Yes, it is. It's called exercise. And after completely destroying physical education, to protect fat kids from being heckled, it's the last bit of exercise kids get nowadays.
I knew when I wrote that line that it would bring at least one of you guys out to comment.
Look -- I completely and utterly agree with you that kids don't get enough exercise. There are all sorts of causes for this.
But the solution is not to force them to lug a large mass of stuff around in an unergonomic way while their bodies are still growing. There are all sorts of problems with this. (And sure, it is possible for kids to get reasonably designed backpacks that distribute the weight well, but even if they have them, many kids do stupid things carrying them. I know I did when I was a kid.)
I'm all for having mandatory physical education or mandatory sports or whatever for kids -- something that would be a healthy way to exercise their bodies. This isn't a good one.
I don't know what the practice in South Africa is, but in the U.S., most public school textbooks are provided by the school. Students can't take notes in them or highlight them. That's still the major advantage for me for paper books: they're easier to annotate quickly and informally (particularly on a tablet). But if you can't do that, why do you need the paper book?
Textbooks from the past couple decades are ridiculously heavy, loading with unnecessary illustrations and other bulk which seem to be there simply for eye-candy for textbook adopting boards. (Completely unnecessary in an internet age when a teacher can project photos of just about anything up as necessary.) But this is beside the point.
I've seen many middle-school kids lugging around backpacks that weigh almost as much as they do. Is that really necessary?
With a tablet, it's not necessary anymore. Textbooks can be filled with not only illustrations but audio and video examples or animations, if needed. And that's not even exploring the possibility for new types of interactivity.
As I'm sure many will point out here, the concern is probably about licensing fees, which will probably require an annual fee to keep using textbooks. So, in the long-term, we need to move toward adoption of more free textbooks (or textbooks that can be simply downloaded, without requiring licensing), many of which already exist online. Heck, for many subjects (primary and secondary math, grammar, etc.), public domain PDF textbooks from 100 years ago would cover almost the same material, saving a lot of money to be spent toward, say, actual interactive apps that teach in innovative ways, along with the few concepts left out of the old textbooks.
first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.
Briefly (if you don't want to read the link), as a result of a major 2012 settlement with Visa and Mastercard, merchants ARE now allowed to charge fees for credit cards. (There are still restrictions on how exactly this is done; a good summary is here.)
Some states have restricted this practice significantly, most commonly requiring that POSTED prices for goods be the higher price, and thus only allowing a "cash discount" rather than an extra "fee" for using credit cards.
I've bought items at two places just in the past couple days that have dual pricing: a gas station and a liquor store. In one case, the advantage of cash pricing far outweighs any credit card bonus point advantage I could get.
The reality, however, is that these creatures have survived long periods (thousands or even millions of years) of both higher CO2 levels and higher oceanic pH levels. Without noticeable damage.
I believe the proper reply to you is "WHOOSH..." yet again!
I understand the details you replied with, but you still completely missed the point.
You stated originally: "But coral evolved when it was both warmer than it is now, AND the concentration of CO2 was many times what it is today."
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the logical chain of your argument as presented is something like, "Earth was different 500 million years ago. Coral evolved in that environment. The environment today is less extreme. THEREFORE, even IF big changes that return back to something closer to the environment of 500 million years ago happen, the coral should be able to survive and thrive."
Isn't that your argument?
Now my problem is: "These creatures" (i.e., the ones existing NOW, at the PRESENT TIME) are not necessarily the EXACT SAME ONES living 500 million years ago. So, unless you have some sort of genetic evidence showing those ancient coral are basically equivalent to modern coral (which they aren't), the conditions of the earth 500 million years ago have no bearing on whether coral today could survive under the same conditions.
I am NOT arguing that human changes to the environment are favorable. I am simply pointing out that these Earth creatures have been through far worse (for humans) conditions in the past and seem little the worse for wear.
But not necessarily RAPID changes happening over a number of decades, rather than over millennia or millions of years. Most descendants of lifeforms that lived 500 million years ago have lost adaptations to thrive in the more extreme conditions of that time. So why should we assume that coral should be different?
Now -- if you have evidence that this coral (i.e., "these creatures," the ones that are living now, not 500 million years ago) can survive and thrive in the new conditions, say from reefs that are already located in places with these conditions and have done well, or from experimental evidence subjecting coral to such conditions, that's great. THAT would be evidence that "these creatures" will continue to survive and thrive.
But until I see THAT sort of evidence, I would tend to assume that creatures today do NOT necessarily have adaptations to thrive well under conditions of 500 million years ago. They might. But lots of lifeforms don't.
I hope you see the logical problem here.
Again, if there is actual evidence that MODERN coral (not millions of years ago coral) can do well under these diverging conditions, that's great. Otherwise, the argument is not valid, since there are plenty of exceptions of lifeforms which have decreased in number or have gone extinct due to minor changes in conditions -- conditions which some random 500-million-year-old ancestor might have been quite happy with.
That may be so. Or it might not be. I don't know enough about this issue to judge.
... that, by definition and your own statements... makes it highly questionable.
Why? A person doesn't have to be an expert in any particular area to spot an error in logic.
The rest of your post is just disputing facts in exchange for theories
I didn't dispute ANY facts. I pointed out that the stated facts are irrelevant without other supporting evidence. Why? Because other well-known facts demonstrate that the facts presented were not sufficient to make a logical case for the conclusion.
For example:
FACT: Many lifeforms on earth differ significantly from their ancestors 500 million years ago.
FACT: As lifeforms evolve over millions of years, they adapt to the present environment, which may involve losing adaptations to past extreme environments.
COROLLARY: Saying "Your great-great-great-[times a few million]-grandpappy could've thrived under conditions X" has no bearing on whether you can survive under conditions X.
FACT: Many lifeforms encounter extreme conditions at some point during the course of the day which would be harmful or fatal if they were exposed to such conditions constantly.
EXAMPLE: Look at common plants -- some like "partial sun," for example. They might do okay with low light or intermittent light for most of the day. They might do okay if you exposed them to direct sunlight for a couple hours and less light for the rest of the day. But if you exposed them to the equivalent of direct sunlight for 24 hours/day every day, they'd likely wither up and die.
COROLLARY: Saying "Organism X can thrive under more extreme conditions Y for a few hours each day" does NOT logically imply that organism X will always be able to survive under CONSTANT extreme conditions Y.
Now, if the parent poster has evidence that coral TODAY can survive and thrive under the changing conditions discussed, THAT would be interesting, and it would actually be evidence in favor of the point. For example, "Coral are more resilient than we might think: they evolved in extreme conditions 500 million years ago, and experiments X, Y, and Z show that this variety would continue to thrive in such conditions even today." The first part of the sentence is still irrelevant to the argument, but at least it makes sense.
As it stands, the parent post consisted solely of facts completely irrelevant to the argument.
The degree of "doomedness" is highly questionable.
That may be so. Or it might not be. I don't know enough about this issue to judge. On the other hand, I do know enough to say with certainty that the logic of your arguments is "highly questionable."
I don't dispute that human activities have harmed coral in many cases. But coral evolved when it was both warmer than it is now, AND the concentration of CO2 was many times what it is today.
What does that have to do with anything? An ancestor of a lifeform from the Cambrian era 500 million years ago evolved to survive in the environment of 500 million years ago. That has no bearing on whether a descendant (which may have evolved significantly since then) that survives well in today's environment would survive well if you put it in a time machine and shipped it back 500 million years.
Let's figure out who one of your ancestors in the "life family tree" was 500 million years ago, and see whether you're well-adpated to survive in its environment living on its sources of food and energy, huh?
Also, studies have shown that the pH in a given location of the ocean typically varies every day far more than any amount that can be attributed to CO2.
Just because something can survive in one environment for a few hours per day or whatever in a healthy way doesn't mean that the organism would still be healthy if subjected to the extremes of that environment continuously.
Let's put this in terms of another example: In other news, many people's diets vary by hundreds of calories from day to day. Some days they might eat 2500 calories; other days they might eat 1800 calories. But if they require an average of 2000 calories/day to maintain weight, there's no possible way they could gain weight by eating an average of 2300 calories/day.
Why? Because -- following your logic -- the daily variability of up to 700 calories is larger than the average increase over baseline of 300 calories. So, there's no possible way they could gain weight. Organisms will be just as healthy living at the extremes of daily variability as they would at the normal average. QED.
I await your forthcoming publication for a new diet plan.
Music is art, art is propaganda (for what concerns public expression, private expression is not on wikipedia), propaganda is meant to influence people.
Even if we accept your broad premise ("all art is fundamentally propaganda"?), then the specific list of people on the list is seriously flawed. Wagner's music (and to a lesser extent, Beethoven's) has certainly been used for propaganda, as well as having a huge influence on our modern conventions for artistic expression in music (e.g., movie scores, which often are very "Wagnerian" in their conception at many expressive moments).
But Bach's and Mozart's music has hardly been used for the sort of propaganda purposes you mention -- there are dozens of other historical composers I can think of who would be better examples of that. I am not at all downplaying their influence in music history or musical styles, but as the greatest examples of music used as "propaganda" to influence people in general? Nope. Not really.
Note that Aristotle outranks Plato, who then outranks Socrates by a huge margin. Considering that the influence of one upon the other is _exactly backwards,_ I do agree that this list may be an _unordered_ list of very influential people, but it certainly is not an _ordered_ list.
By this logic, the most influential person who ever lived should be the first person who ever lived -- as that person influenced the next person, who influenced the next person, etc., etc., etc.
Obviously that sounds like a bad metric, which makes sense if you actually consider Aristotle's notions of causality. In particular, the notion of proximate vs. ultimate cause is important. One can always go back further in the train of causality, perhaps all the way to the Big Bang or whatever. The question isn't who ultimately set the train of influence in motion, but rather which historical figures have had contributions or ideas whose influence spread most widely. Socrates's parents or some of his random teachers were probably influential on his development, but I sincerely doubt anyone thinks they should be on this list.
Anyhow, getting to the specific point -- Aristotle most certainly deserves to be further up this list than the others. When medieval and renaissance writers made a statement like, "As the philosopher said..." the "philosopher" was always assumed to be Aristotle. He was THE philosopher, and his views on everything from philosophical issues like causality (as mentioned) to logic to all sorts of scientific principles contributed, perhaps more than any other thinker, to the development of medieval and early modern thought. It was only in the 17th century that any serious attempts were made to break away from the prevailing Aristotelean mode of thought on many issues.
And even after that, his ideas have remained hugely influential -- some credit Darwinian concepts of evolution on Aristotle's notions of a "final cause" (probably via Lamarck). Certainly most of our narratives about history are formulated according to this principle: we generally don't tend to care much about why people in the past thought the way they did -- instead, we highlight elements of the past that lead up to the present day, so we can see a "progression" of ideas toward our present, in effect a search for the "final cause."
Meanwhile, Plato (or, rather Neo-platonism) was certainly influential in the Hellenistic period, as well as the early medieval period, but it was arguably the rediscovery of Aristotle that made significant contributions to the renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries. The rediscovery of ancient knowledge at this time arguably influenced the quest to find more (and the later "renaissance" most people talk about), and the advances in scientific ideas and empiricism from this time laid the foundations for the development of modern science. Plato was much less important for these trends (though he still was quite important for some elements of philosophy and political theory).
As for Socrates, well, 99% of what we know of him comes through the dramatic dialogues concerning him written by Plato. If Socrates really said and did most of the things Plato ascribed to him, then Plato shouldn't be on the list at all -- it was really only Socrates. But, as most scholars think is more likely, if Socrates was merely the inspiration and teacher of Plato (where Plato added a lot of details himself), then the products of Plato's work were significantly more influential than Socrates himself. There's a reason the academy was known as Plato's academy and why we get "Platonism" and "Neo-platonism" as significant movements. (Socrates's influence in terminology is usually confined to a few specific terms, like the "Socratic method," rather than entire philosophical movements.)
Hmm... Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Michael Jackson, and Elvis Presley. Am I the only one who finds it strange that 6 out of the top 100 influential people OF ALL TIME were musicians?
Don't get me wrong: I love music. But in terms of overall impact on HISTORY -- I mean ALL of history -- 6% of this list is musicians?
Others have criticized this list and methodology for all sorts of reasons. But this fact alone would have me scratching my head. I mean, obviously the influence of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner on music history has been significant. (Beethoven and Wagner arguably had significant impacts on philosophy and aesthetics (Beethoven indirectly), but nothing compared to boatloads of actual philosophers.) But influence on humanity in general over the course of all history?
And arguably contributors to the written word and history, among various humanists and artists, have had a larger impact on culture in general than musicians. A few like Goethe and Rousseau make the list, but Tolkien's here and no Milton or Cervantes? And if we're going to include popular culture icons of the 20th century like Michael Jackson and Elvis, where are the people who created arguably the most significant new art form the 20th century -- film? Where are D.W. Griffith or Murnau or Charlie Chaplin? (I'm not suggesting they should be here, but the list as it stands don't make sense if it's supposed to measure influence or innovation.)
Heck, where's Adam Smith? His economic theories -- right or wrong -- have probably been responsible for more monetary policy decisions that have had huge economic impacts on society. (I suppose I should be happy that Marx made the list...)
The serious problems with this methodology should be readily apparent just from looking at the inane qualities of this list.
Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus.
It depends on what you allow as evidence. Even the few historians who seriously question the authenticity of Josephus's account also have to deal with one of the most influential and well-known Roman historians, Tacitus, who mentions the trial of "Christus" under Pontius Pilate. And, they have to deal with the account by Roman historian Suetonius, who mentions a Christian leader called "Chrestus" who created disturbances against the Romans.
Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius were at all sympathetic to the Christian cause -- the former was a patriotic Roman senator who referred to "Christian abominations" in his writings, and the latter portrayed "Chrestus" as some sort of rabble-rouser (as well as other details which conflict with the Gospel accounts and seem unlikely to be the result of some later interpolation).
Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways.
Yes, and if we were dealing with one or two sources that seem to conflict with the rest of the historical record, that could be a reasonable conclusion.
But instead we have a number of sources from very different contexts, at least two of whom get similar details like Pilate being involved in the punlishment. And we get these hints showing up in multiple historical documents where the details don't even quite agree ("Chrestus"? -- and most importantly, the details even say things that contradict the Gospels in the Bible).
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.
Yeah, except -- as I said, they didn't do that in all the sources, which disagree. Why would medieval monks randomly insert erroneous information into a smattering of random sources that in places contradict the biblical accounts?
To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians.
That's pretty near crazy.
Mainly because there is no historical evidence that there was any great controversies in the early Church or from the opponenets of Christianity about whether Jesus had been a real person. This sort of debate just never came up. And if you read accounts of enemies of Christians and even those early Christians who had a great variety of ideas about Jesus that would now be considered heretical, NONE of them bothers to say, "Oh, yeah, and Christ/Jesus never really existed anyway."
It really wasn't a question that came up in scholarship until the 1800s. So, it seems pretty crazy that there was this medieval conspiracy theory to plant random references in multiple ancient sources, some of which were even contradictory, just in case many centuries later somebody would question whether Jesus was a real person.
The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
First off, many aren't.
Why should they be, in general? Police actions should be documented for public audit to ensure against police abuses, certainly. And if someone was arrested, charged, and ultimately convicted of a crime, that should be a matter of public record.
But why should I have access to the records on loads of people who are arrested every day and ultimately not convicted -- many of them not even charged? I'm not saying that there might not be some reason to access them (e.g., to establish a pattern for someone arrested multiple times for complaints), but those reasons usually have to do with internal police or court proceedings, not something the general public should see.
Otherwise, we're advocating a system not based on evidence of guilt (which is determined by courts), but rather based on whatever random reason a cop happens to take a particular action on a particular day. (Usually, the reasons are good; sometimes they are not -- there's a reason we have courts to assess guilt, not media stories or records of random encounters without supporting evidence.)
Why can't Google allow them to be searched?
I actually think you have a bit of a point here about the ruling. If information is actually considered defamatory or whatever, the ruling should allow action against the original indexed website as well as Google. It makes no sense to say that information is too defamatory to be allowed in Google's search results, but it can still exist on a publicly accessible hyperlink viewable from anywhere in the world.
What you're saying is that, since the records are still available somewhere, it is perfectly acceptable to make them almost impossible to find. That's not good.
That's NOT what GP said at all. You're presenting a false dichotomy of the worst sort. There are a lot of degrees between "almost impossible to find" and at the top of Google's search results. For example, you even quoted a passage from GP that said a record should still be available to be viewed at the police office, which is a logical place to look for police records. I certainly wouldn't call that "almost impossible to find."
It just means that finding something requires effort. Heck, if the police themselves want to index their records and make them searchable, and those records are available to the public, maybe they can do such searches at the police station for you. Or maybe they would respond to phone or internet requests for individual searches or records. Or maybe they could even make a computer available at the police station for you to search yourself. Or....
There are at least a few intermediate options right there.
Just because information can be accessed by the public doesn't mean that it should be easily available in the top 10 hits of a search engine. I think there are a lot of problems with this court ruling, but the underlying motivation is correct: you should have a right to correct potentially outdated or misleading information about yourself that is displayed publicly, particularly if you are already guaranteed that right under law (as in EU law, apparently).
The point of good governance is not to trick people into breaking the laws.
Sure it is. I used to live in a city that has a strange byzantine schedule for street cleaning, just so it could hit everybody who forgot up for a $50 fine. I once talked to a guy who had gotten involved in local government, and he admitted that more than 1/3 of the city's budget came from street cleaning fines. Every time there was street cleaning, every neighborhood had a few cars on every block who would forget.
So it is important that people follow the laws, and not just put things so we can just bring in revenue.
You would think that, but parking regulations in many cities do not bear this statement out.
In this city I was talking about, parking was limited in lots of places. Thankfully, my neighborhood was not one of them. When people would come to visit me, they could park on the street next to my place. It was cool.
Except for street cleaning. The $50 fines were more than for some actual safety violations, like parking too close to an intersection or parking near a fire hydrant. (I think actually "blocking" it by parking directly in front may have been more.)
Around 2008, tax revenues went down, so suddenly the street cleaning schedule was lengthened by an extra month -- until the end of December. Unfortunately, we often had significant snowfalls in December, so this caused huge problems when the combination of a snow emergency AND "street cleaning" happened to occur on the same day, meaning no parking was available basically anywhere in the city. (The city waived the street cleaning a few times, but it caused a lot of confusion anyway.)
The financial downturn continued, so suddenly they decided the entire city had to require permits for parking -- even neighborhoods (like mine) that had plenty of parking. Was this to help citizens to find parking? No. It was to raise revenue without raising tax rates. We all shell out a little more for a parking permit, more people get ticketed, and the city makes up its deficit.
By the time we got a couple more years in, the city was desperate. So they had to consolidate street cleaner schedules. It turned out that my neighborhood never saw the street cleaners come by during their appointed hours for an entire season. Cars were required to move from 8am-2pm or something, but the street cleaners never came to my neighborhood until 4pm at the earliest.
Surprise! The streets weren't any more dirty than before!
Didn't matter. Every single week, there would still be a line of cars with tickets on their windshields for $50 fines -- just to tax the forgetful people who couldn't remember the weird street cleaning schedule.
Oh -- yeah, and they used to have an automated service that would send you an email reminding you the day before to move your car. They did away with that as well, around 2009 or 2010. What do you think the motivation for that was?
Parking regulations in big cities are often more about revenue than you think. Public safety is secondary. For four years I lived across the street from a space where city regulations technically prohibited parking, because there was a space between a fire hydrant and an intersection. I measured it. You couldn't park a car there while satisfying safety regulations, yet every day someone parked there. I pointed this out one time to a pass meter officer who was doing his appointed street-cleaning ticketing rounds, and he shrugged it off.
The problem was that the sidewalk wasn't painted there clearly to mark distance from hydrants or intersections. In fact, very little of the city was. Most of the paint that was visible was decades old, and often related to things that didn't even apply anymore.
Basically, so I was told, ticketing people for parking too close to something required measurements, because the painting was often not clear. It was too hard and too laborious,
I think it is the upcoming popular Linux for the desktop.
Upcoming?
Linux Mint has received the most hits of any distro over at DistroWatch for the past 2.5 years or so, after it surpassed Ubuntu.
There's no way to get hard numbers on this sort of stuff, but Mint has already been one of the most popular Linux desktop distros for years, and some have claimed (based on DistroWatch and other sites with hit counts) that it has been #1 (or close to it) for a few years already.
I'm sure others will chime in here with some other data, but my anecdotal evidence is that I know four friends who switched to Linux in the past couple years. While I'm sure I talked about Linux with them, I wasn't involved in their decision, and I don't think any of them had a lot of guidance from other friends about which distro to go with... they just wanted to try Linux. And all four have ended up using Mint. Some checked out Ubuntu but didn't like it, or read articles saying Mint was better, so they decided to try Mint instead.
Again, I'm not claiming this is hard proof of anything. But there's been a lot of buzz around Mint, and it clearly has had enough positive press to pull in some of my friends who were looking to try Linux.
In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014.
Agreed. Even 5 years ago, I would NOT have recommended desktop Linux as a serious replacement, unless the person had some family member or friend who could be "tech support" when something weird went wrong and the fix required editing a bunch of text files on the command line. I certainly wouldn't recommend any inexperienced users try to install it by themselves, unless they were technologically savvy and had some command line experience. (Someone might get lucky, though, and get a system working immediately with no tweaking.)
But today? It may not be the perennial "Year of the Linux desktop," but we do finally have things that "just work" in many more user cases than ever before. I hopped from distro to distro for years, trying to find something I didn't have to tinker with all the time or worry whether multimedia would randomly not work or whether an upgrade would break half of the things I spent hours fixing for last upgrade. Linux Mint was the first to approach a relatively stable "just works" philosophy for the casual desktop user.
I even installed it on an older useless underpowered laptop for a clueless family member over the holidays (Windows had slowed the point that it wasn't useful, and they were tired of Windows). I didn't make any special tweaks other than putting a few shortcuts on the desktop. I knew I only see these people over the holidays, so I wouldn't be around for random tech support. But I wasn't concerned because they had basically just stopped using this computer, so the worst case scenario was that it remained useless. Recently, I heard it was still working great... and if Mint can survive as a useful system for 6 months on the machine of a clueless relative who never used Linux before, well, I'd say that's an achievement.
If you're not working full time you have time to work 2 part time jobs. Hell even if you are working full time you have time for another part time job
Please re-read the first part of my comment. I explicitly discussed this. The problem is that many part-time jobs require you to be dependent on other people who choose your schedule and/or effectively "on call" to come in and work whenever you're needed. If you have two jobs and at least one of your bosses is somewhat flexible, you might be okay.
If both of your bosses don't give a crap and just need someone to be there whenever they call them, don't expect to be called back when you can't come in a few times.
I'm not saying it's impossible to work two part-time jobs. People do it all the time. But if you look at various reports on trends in employment stats, you'll have noticed the trend in recent years toward increasing "flexible" employment, where you need to show up when they call you. That can make it pretty hard to satisfy the demands of two separate employers.
Did I say it had to be? No. I was arguing against the Parent Poster's comment, which was in response to GP's comment that a minimum wage was "barely a liveable wage." The Parent responded and said people who couldn't figure out how live on that were "clueless and/or spoiled" and it was "certainly enough to get by."
I then responded to and said it probably wouldn't be that easy for everyone, and I gave examples where it might be harder, i.e., closer to GP's claim that for some people it might "barely" be "a liveable wage."
In other words, I wasn't at all arguing that it should be "easy," but rather that for some people with these situations, it simply isn't, and it's rather ignorant to suggest that it is.
If you made poor decisions in your life (no skills, children you can't afford, living in an area you can't afford) why is it my responsibility (or the government's responsibility, or a private company's responsibility) to provide for you?
Some people are actually stupid, you know. I don't mean to insult them. I mean that for some people it's really difficult to develop good skills that would be worth more than $15/hour to somebody. If you're officially "mentally retarded," you can often get government subsidies to assist you. But if you're above the arbitrary borderline, you're on your own. Many of the guys who are washing dishes in a kitchen or cleaning the bathroom or bagging your groceries would have serious difficulties developing more "skills" to be competitive in the marketplace. I'm NOT saying we should just give them a happy life for free, but not everyone in the world has the same natural talents for earning potential as anyone else.
As for children, growing up in poverty has all sorts of negative repercussions for kids, and it leads to a cycle where the kids end up living crappy lives again. I don't think there are easy answers to this problem, but simply saying "it's not my problem" will ultimately lead to a generation of more kids in poverty, committing more crimes, etc. down the road. Again, I'm NOT saying we should just throw money at the problem, but we shouldn't ignore it either. (Also, note that combined with above -- stupid people often don't make the best choices. That can include having kids they can't afford. But as a society we've decided that forced sterilization of stupid people is wrong. So... well, that leaves us with a problem of people who sometimes have kids they can't afford, and we need to address it somehow.)
As for "living in an area you can't afford," well, it depends on where you can get a job. You move out of the city, maybe you have to get a car -- a car costs money, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc. You save on rent, but spend more for your car and have a longer commute which means you can't work as many hours. Sure, in some cases you could solve things by moving, but in other cases it's not so simple. I'm not saying this one is the government's problem, but it is a rationale for trying to tailor our poverty policies to the cost of the standard of living in a particular area. Hence my reply to the original parent about $30k -- in some areas, that's plenty to live comfortably. In others, not so much. We just need to be conscious of that.
The only item I agree with on your list is health, often health problems are not under a person's control.
How about (4) on my list: other dependents? Like, for example, ailing parents. Are they under your control, too? I made my choice to care for my sick dad who can't work, so I have to "pay the piper"? Also, there are all sorts of situations where you can end up taking care of people -- for example, kids often end up living with aunts or grandparents if their parents are unable to care for them (for whatever reason). Is it still my "choice" to make if my grandkid needs a home, and I don't want him to go to
What we really need is a maximum wage; a maximum amount of annual income -- from any source -- that a person can make. This maximum amount should be tied to the median income or some such so that if the rich and powerful want to increase their earning limit, they have to do things that will benefit all of society instead of hurting all of society.
It sounds like what you're getting at here is close to John Rawls's "maximin" idea, which he described in A Theory of Justice, one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the 20th century.
Rawls basically proposed that we all imagine entering into a society behind a "veil of ignorance," where we have no idea how our abilities will stack up against others in the society. Will we be at the top -- the smartest, most talented, etc.? Or will our natural abilities put us near the bottom, essentially treated as nearly mentally retarded?
If we didn't know any of those things entering into a society, how would we design a tax system? Rawls proposed the maximin principle, which basically states that we should allow the talented and smart and motivated people to accumulate wealth as long as they aren't doing so by making the living conditions of people at the bottom worse. Giving people the freedom to earn more makes them motivated, and that often benefits those who are "further down" in society. But at some point, accumulation of wealth becomes oppressive and actually no longer benefits those at the bottom.
Your proposal is interesting, but it provides no motivation to those who have the talent or discipline or resources to earn more than your "maximum wage." Why keep working after you've earned the "maximum wage" for the year? If you really wanted to implement something like your idea, it would make more sense to make the taxation system more progressive, essentially a kind of exponential curve that takes a higher and higher percentage as income goes up. Perhaps the billionaire is taxed at 90% or greater rate for another billion in earnings -- that's still a motivation, because he/she takes home an extra 10 million for that effort. If you put a hard cap as a "maximum wage," though, anyone who exceeds the cap has less motivation to continue working hard. And overall, while rich people take a lot away from society, their role in the monetary system means that if they stop doing things with money, it makes it harder for the rest of the economy to grow.
$15/hour is approximately $30,000 per year. If you can't figure out how to live on $30,000 per year then you are utterly clueless and/or spoiled.
It's truly sad how many of this sort of ignorant comments a story like this brings out.
The main thing to take note of is that many people who work for minimum wage don't work full-time. So, you can't just extrapolate from an hourly wage to an annual salary. And most part-time workers are subject to the whims of their employer in terms of work schedule. If you're not getting enough hours from one job, it's often difficult to add on another part-time job, because many employers demand flexibility in your schedule. You can't come in a few times? Fine -- they'll start calling someone else.
No it won't be a posh lifestyle but it's certainly enough to get by and it will be in 6.5 years too baring economic catastrophe.
If you're (1) a single person (2) with no kids (3) in good health (4) with no dependents (5) in an area where rents and cost of living aren't outrageous, yeah, it's almost "certainly enough to get by." You might even be able to live reasonably well, if you are budget-conscious. If any of those is not true, it can be harder. If you have a number of these "conditions," even assuming a full-time job and a $30,000 income, it may not be easy.
Even at the median rent level, a worker that earns $8/hour
All of your numbers seem to magically assume a full-time job. Hint: many people who work at or near minimum wage don't have full-time jobs. They thus often don't get benefits, which means they don't get time off for illness or anything, which means you need to factor in lost wages when they can't make it to work.
When the GP says they have to cobble together 2-3 jobs, it's often 2-3 independent part-time jobs, which together often don't add up to 1 full-time job in terms of total wages. And to keep said jobs, you often have to work whenever you're demanded to, which might mean working two full shifts in one day some days, and nothing other days. Unless at least one boss is willing to be flexible, it will be difficult to hold onto more than one job, too.
If some of the jobs are seasonal or dependent on the weather or a service job where you only get called in when things are busy, expect to go through significant periods where you're making a lot less than full-time on that minimum wage.
will still have $450/month left over for food, clothing, etc.
The median rent level shouldn't be taken as a cost of living for any particular area in the U.S. -- obviously in most big cities, the median rent for the city will likely be higher than the U.S. overall. Also, unless you have dependents, you're probably going to pay at least some income tax with that sort of income -- not a lot, but it could still decrease your monthly discretionary spending by maybe $30-50/month (maybe more), which is a significant percentage of $450.
However, let's assume your numbers for the moment. Have you ever had to live on something close to minimum wage in a big city? There are a LOT of things that have to fit into that "$450/month left over for food, clothing, etc." It's not just "etc."
Do you need a car to get to your job? Insurance alone in a big city for a young person (most likely to be working at minimum wage) might cost you $100-200/month, not to mention fuel, maintenance, and a car payment. It's pretty difficult to imagine a situation where you could own a car for less than $100/month in a city. And if you don't have a car, you might have less flexibility about where and when you can work, or whether you'd be able to get between jobs efficiently. So you end up with a commuter pass for public transport instead of a car, which might also cost ~$100/month. (If you don't have a car, though, you might occasionally need to pay for transportation to get to somewhere unusual that you can't get to by public transport.) So, let's say at least $100/month for transport, probably at least $200/month if you really need a car.
Next let's talk about utilities. It helps to have a phone, if you want to actually be able to get calls to come in for a job. Even if you go with the cheapest landline, combine it with heat and electricity, it seems doubtful you're going to get away with less than $100/month total for utilities. Don't think there's going to be much left over for a cell phone or cable tv/internet.
Now you have to budget for miscellaneous expenses, like doctor and dental bills. If you're healthy, great. I know Obamacare is supposed to give poor people health insurance, but so far I get the impression it's mostly catastrophic health insurance unless you pay a higher premium (too high for your budget). Let's suppose you get a magic subsidy that gives you minimal coverage without any premium (most people this would also add a signfiicant expense to your budget as well, potentially thousands of dollars per year). If you just get sick, or have a toothache, be prepared to pay at least something out of pocket. On the low end, you might be able to get away with budgeting only $10-20/month for this, but if you have any health problems, you might need to budget a lot more.
What about other miscellaneous expenses? Need a haircut? Get your
I agree that the US justice system is too quick to arrest and prosecute people, and that many things are wrongly defined as crimes. If you want to fix that, then fix it
Yes, I agree it would be great to "fix it." But even if we stop a significant percentage of bad arrests and prosecutions, police are never going to be 100% sure when they have to arrest someone in a situation where there's a apparently significant safety threat. And prosecutors are never going to be 100% certain they'll get a guilty plea. Even if we don't arrest people for stupid laws, we'll still have errors and abuses of power.
So, even if we do the reform you suggest, we just reduce the frequency of the problem, but still have people whose names and reputations are ruined unnecessarily. You're never going to get a perfect system.
And as long as you have a free press, you'll have sensationalist journalism that's going to unfairly present those who have been arrested or accused. As far as I can tell, we have a few options:
(1) Attempt something like this "right to be forgotten" (which, by the way, I don't really think will work well)
(2) Have secret police and court proceedings (not good for anyone -- will lead to more abuse rather than less)
(3) Severely restrict freedom of the press and publishing information about people arrested or accused (not good for general freedom, also likely to lead to abuse)
(4) Force news media to run equivalent levels of coverage refuting their accusations when charges are dropped or someone is acquitted (never gonna happen, and nobody will pay attention anyway)
(5) Actively begin investigating and prosecuting people who are suspected of discriminating against those who have had a "run in with the law" but were never convicted or charged (again, unlikely to happen)
I'm open to other ideas. These all sound pretty impossible to me, and some sound stupid. But perhaps trying to let someone who was never charged or convicted of a crime to attempt to ensure that news stories about an erroneous arrest aren't the top search engine link is one small concession, and probably the least worrisome as a threat to other freedoms. I don't know.
I think that much of your confusion comes from this idea of responsibility. It's not that google did anything wrong by indexing the information in question
Umm, I think you're the one who is "confused." Let's assume some good faith here, huh? I'm NOT the one making any claim that Google is responsible. Again, here is the quotation I originally was responding to in the OP:
The problem with Google is that they are clearly assuming that US law/mindset should operate worldwide. Google need to get over themselves and make sure their information retention follows the same rehabilitation law that exists already to protect the rights of ex-offenders, for a very good reason.
It was the OP who was overly concerned with Google's "assumptions" and apparent motives adhering to a "US mindset" or whatever. I was just responding to that.
When someone is sentenced by court, the newspaper is allowed to publish that information and google is allowed to index it, someone googling that information at that point in time is supposed to be able to find that information. Some years later when that sentencing is no longer relevant the newspaper is still out there and can be accessed in archives, however the information is no longer to be actively published. This is the point in time where people are now allowed to require google to stop indexing that content.
I'm not an idiot. I understand perfectly well what the court ruling says, and I actually agree that it is a good first step. What I'm saying is that it won't actually work, as long as the information is "actively published" somewhere (as you put it) -- and if it's easily available through a hyperlink on the web somewhere, it's basically still "actively published."
As someone else put it in a post elsewhere in this thread, it's sort of like saying piracy is legal, but the Pirate Bay can't link to it. Somebody else will link to it... and if you stop them, somebody else will... and if you stop them, somebody else will aggregate information together in a database elsewhere online... and if you stop them... well, you get the point.
To use another comparison, as long as the information is still on the internet, it's like somebody plastered posters screaming "X is a pedophile" and "Y is a pedophile" and whoever else in various corridors in a public train station. Somebody else created a directory and posted it at the entrance to the train station, so you could find the exact corridor and location where the posters are for any particular person.
This court ruling says we have to tear down the directory. But the posters are still there, hung prominently in a very public place. Surely if they are truly defamatory, we should be worried about taking the posters down from easily accessible public view, not just about destroying the directory.
If we require online newspapers to actually put stuff in an "archive" that can't be externally linked with individual internal records, maybe you START to get close to the idea you're supporting. But most online media isn't like that, and even if we required that, could we stop bloggers from republishing crucial details, or would that constitute defamation? What if those bloggers are in another country? And, besides, just about anything that appears in any prominent media is reiterated in 5 times as many other links that archive stuff or provide short snippets or whatever. Must Google delink all of those? What about the new ones that pop up next week? What about all the dozens of other reasonably comprehensive search engines?
Again, I'm absolutely in agreement with the idea that privacy SHOULD be protected, and I think the kinds of privacy standards you're mentioning are perfectly reasonable. I just don't think there's any chance at all that this will be a successful strategy, given the nature of the internet. And in a few years (if not sooner), we're going to have to confront the reality that either we have to give up the "right" you want to claim, or we need to impose much more draconian regulation to actually make it work.
You're going towards this completely backwards. The European approach to this is not that it should be impossible for people to find out the past history of other people, it should simply require effort.
I completely understand what the European approach is here, and I didn't say I disagreed with it. I do disagree that Google is somehow the primary responsible party, however -- which the post I was responding to claimed. It's not like Google is deliberately trying to flout privacy laws -- it's just indexing information. If we want to rein them in, then we should, but let's not pretend they're doing this maliciously or deliberately trying to avoid some sort of "rights."
And if you re-read my post, you should find that I actually agree with you. Perhaps I used the wrong word, but that was precisely the point I was making about making something easy to "find" vs. easy to "access." Google makes things that are already accessible easier to find. The original sites that post the information are what have made this information possible to access with almost no effort.
If someone wants to find out your criminal record, they're still perfectly free to ask for it as it remains a public record.
And, you see, that's the difference here between 30 years ago and today. A few decades ago, you'd have to go somewhere and request a public record, perhaps even pay a fee for it if you wanted a copy. Today, you can get this stuff easily -- it often doesn't require much more effort than a search to find the website that has information, if Google doesn't index it itself. No driving across town or writing a letter and paying a fee -- no digging through dusty archives or spending hours paging through the microfilm reader.
You say "it should simply require effort," and what I'm saying is that Google is only the final link in a chain of digitized records that have made the retrieval of this information practically effortless. 99% of this reduction in effort is done by the people who serve up the information on publicly accessible sites, in most cases. Google is just providing the final link... and if they don't do it, somebody else will. If it's illegal for Google to index people convicted of pedophilia or fraud or whoever, don't you think other sites will pop up to aggregate that data for all the people who want to know that information?
Which again leads me to my original point -- if the information is truly so inflammatory that it defames someone's character unfairly, the law should allow deletion from anywhere the public could simply access it with a few keystrokes. Otherwise, it isn't actually going to achieve your goal that "it should simply require effort."
I'm not saying the present law does nothing -- Google is widely used, and this will make some difference. But let's wait 10 years and see how this plays out: I sincerely doubt that this ruling is going to do what people think it will. Either it will only be a superficial fix, not really addressing the real problem, which will be circumvented over time, or the ruling will have to be "beefed up" to take more extreme data protection measures that frankly would have to be rather scary to be effective in accomplishing this task.
When they raid a house and find a kitchen scale, they should not use biased terms such as "drug paraphernalia" that poisons the jury pool and reputation of the person they are investigating,
I agree. Unfortunately, though, depending on your local jurisdiction, some common tools (like anything that looks like lab glassware) may automatically be defined as "drug precursors" or "paraphenalia." Texas has a particularly notorious set of regulations about this, which requires you to get a permit to own things like a basic boiling flask or Erlenmeyer. They even include things like a "filter funnel" or "separatory funnel" on the list -- I wonder if a gravy separator counts....
So -- sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes your kitchen equipment is LEGALLY defined as "chemical laboratory apparatus" which automatically is a "precursor" to drugs.
(As someone who finds things like the shape, durability, aesthetics, and pouring lips of certain types of lab glassware to be useful in the kitchen for normal food preparation, serving, or storage tasks, I find such laws rather offensive. Well... even if I didn't cook with lab glassware, I'd still find it insane.)
This is a little bit different from the 'unlisted number' situation that you mention. At least in the U.S. you have a contractual relationship with the phone company to supply phone service, and you're presumably paying an extra fee to have an unlisted number. There is no third party involved (such as google), just you and the phone company.
But, as I mentioned, there are plenty of online databases of phone numbers now (for example). If you were paying for a phone company to keep your number private, but they kept just releasing it to whoever wanted it (including the online databases), we shouldn't just find fault in the online database, no? The phone company is also responsible for giving out information it isn't supposed to, correct?
The GP was arguing that people have some sort of "right" to keep some of this older information private if defamed the person's character after he/she had served time or whatever. Assuming the GP's right exists, isn't the entity that posts that information in a worldwide accessible venue as responsible (even more responsible) for serving that information up to the world as someone who merely aggregates links to it?
I agree that the analogy is not precise, because in one case you might be paying a fee. But nevertheless, in one case, a company chooses to violate your "right" to keep privacy by not fulfilling the contract; in the other, a media company (or whatever) chooses to violate the GP's "right" to not have your old "dirty laundry" hung out in public. In both cases, according to the GP, there's a company who is serving up public information in a venue that legally it isn't supposed to. And, assuming the existence of Google and online phone databases, in both cases that information will be indexed and made available far beyond the original phone company or media company (or whatever) that provided the information inappropriately.
An analogy is credit rating - they don't lend the money but they have influence over those that do. You need to clear your name with the agency not the lender.
What kind of analogy is this??
(1) The present scenario concerning the "right to be forgotten" has to do with deleting factual information from a database, whereas you can't get factual information deleted from your credit report. You can only get errors corrected.
(2) The credit reporting agencies don't really "have influence over" lenders. They are responsible for providing accurate information, but it's not like they can strong-arm a lender into making changes to their records.
(3) Legally, the agencies are only required to investigate a dispute -- they are NOT an arbiter of what ultimately appears on your report. If there's sufficient documentation to satisfy your lender (not the agency), the lender will request a correction or amendation to your credit report. If your lender refuses to make a correction, the agency can't just change the records -- at best, it will allow you to attach a statement to your report explaining your side of the story (which you may pay a fee for).
In sum, it's not really a comparable situation to begin with, and the credit reporting agencies don't really "clear your name" -- to do so, you generally have to convince the lender of the truth of your claim. If you ever have a serious credit dispute, you'd be best served by contacting BOTH the agencies AND your lender -- not communicating with your lender is likely to make the situation worse and even more difficult to resolve.
On the contrary, there is clear and strong public interest in having someone's past run-ins with the law being available -- so that others can make an informed evaluation whether they want to deal with the person in question.
Please define "run-in with the law."
Here's the problem with your statement: loads of people are arrested every single day for stupid reasons and often without any real evidence of wrong-doing. Only some percentage of them are ultimately charged with a crime. And only an even smaller percentage are ever convincted.
Supposedly, in the United States, there is a right against "double jeopardy" or being tried again for the same crime once exonerated. A legal corollary to that is that you can't be punished more than once for the same offense. That right exists precisely to prevent malicious prosecution that could keep coming back and harassing someone or even ruining their character through repeated abuse of the legal system... even without sufficient evidence for conviction. It is designed to require the State to present its case, have a speedy trial, and then let the person alone again if it can't prove wrong-doing, so they can get on with their lives. And yet what you're advocating is effectively a private version of this sort of harassment: regardless of the legal outcome, we should be suspicious of those who have had "run-ins with the law."
We have media reports every day of people who are arrested and people who go to trial. Those initial bursts of media activity are usually the strongest. Unless it's a particularly gruesome or unusual trial, usually the media attention tapers off... and often we NEVER even hear about when the charges are dropped or the trial is stopped or the person is acquitted. If it does appear, it might be buried in a small short paragraph story, instead of the big headline that followed the arrest.
Media coverage thus gives an inaccurate and often even completely false portrayal of people who have had "run-ins with the law." In years past, the media coverage would have been lost except in some archive, requiring someone to dig through old stacks of papers or microfilm. Nowadays, it is often available instantly with the typing of a few characters on a computer.
There's a reason why we require people to swear an oath to tell "the whole truth" and not just "the truth." Even facts -- like person X was arrested or person Y went on trial -- can often be incredibly misleading without context of what happened later. So, even if you want to advocate that we should continue to be suspicious and punish those who have been CONVICTED of serious crimes after they have served their time (itself a questionable idea), there still is a legitimate interest in protecting the rights of those who were NOT convicted (or perhaps never even tried or even charged, for lack of evidence).
"Run-ins with the law" are not themselves a crime, and people should not be punished or have their reputation ruined for them.
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Yes, it is. It's called exercise. And after completely destroying physical education, to protect fat kids from being heckled, it's the last bit of exercise kids get nowadays.
I knew when I wrote that line that it would bring at least one of you guys out to comment.
Look -- I completely and utterly agree with you that kids don't get enough exercise. There are all sorts of causes for this.
But the solution is not to force them to lug a large mass of stuff around in an unergonomic way while their bodies are still growing. There are all sorts of problems with this. (And sure, it is possible for kids to get reasonably designed backpacks that distribute the weight well, but even if they have them, many kids do stupid things carrying them. I know I did when I was a kid.)
I'm all for having mandatory physical education or mandatory sports or whatever for kids -- something that would be a healthy way to exercise their bodies. This isn't a good one.
I don't know what the practice in South Africa is, but in the U.S., most public school textbooks are provided by the school. Students can't take notes in them or highlight them. That's still the major advantage for me for paper books: they're easier to annotate quickly and informally (particularly on a tablet). But if you can't do that, why do you need the paper book?
Textbooks from the past couple decades are ridiculously heavy, loading with unnecessary illustrations and other bulk which seem to be there simply for eye-candy for textbook adopting boards. (Completely unnecessary in an internet age when a teacher can project photos of just about anything up as necessary.) But this is beside the point.
I've seen many middle-school kids lugging around backpacks that weigh almost as much as they do. Is that really necessary?
With a tablet, it's not necessary anymore. Textbooks can be filled with not only illustrations but audio and video examples or animations, if needed. And that's not even exploring the possibility for new types of interactivity.
As I'm sure many will point out here, the concern is probably about licensing fees, which will probably require an annual fee to keep using textbooks. So, in the long-term, we need to move toward adoption of more free textbooks (or textbooks that can be simply downloaded, without requiring licensing), many of which already exist online. Heck, for many subjects (primary and secondary math, grammar, etc.), public domain PDF textbooks from 100 years ago would cover almost the same material, saving a lot of money to be spent toward, say, actual interactive apps that teach in innovative ways, along with the few concepts left out of the old textbooks.
first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.
Nope. Not anymore.
Briefly (if you don't want to read the link), as a result of a major 2012 settlement with Visa and Mastercard, merchants ARE now allowed to charge fees for credit cards. (There are still restrictions on how exactly this is done; a good summary is here.)
Some states have restricted this practice significantly, most commonly requiring that POSTED prices for goods be the higher price, and thus only allowing a "cash discount" rather than an extra "fee" for using credit cards.
I've bought items at two places just in the past couple days that have dual pricing: a gas station and a liquor store. In one case, the advantage of cash pricing far outweighs any credit card bonus point advantage I could get.
The reality, however, is that these creatures have survived long periods (thousands or even millions of years) of both higher CO2 levels and higher oceanic pH levels. Without noticeable damage.
I believe the proper reply to you is "WHOOSH..." yet again!
I understand the details you replied with, but you still completely missed the point.
You stated originally: "But coral evolved when it was both warmer than it is now, AND the concentration of CO2 was many times what it is today."
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the logical chain of your argument as presented is something like, "Earth was different 500 million years ago. Coral evolved in that environment. The environment today is less extreme. THEREFORE, even IF big changes that return back to something closer to the environment of 500 million years ago happen, the coral should be able to survive and thrive."
Isn't that your argument?
Now my problem is: "These creatures" (i.e., the ones existing NOW, at the PRESENT TIME) are not necessarily the EXACT SAME ONES living 500 million years ago. So, unless you have some sort of genetic evidence showing those ancient coral are basically equivalent to modern coral (which they aren't), the conditions of the earth 500 million years ago have no bearing on whether coral today could survive under the same conditions.
I am NOT arguing that human changes to the environment are favorable. I am simply pointing out that these Earth creatures have been through far worse (for humans) conditions in the past and seem little the worse for wear.
But not necessarily RAPID changes happening over a number of decades, rather than over millennia or millions of years. Most descendants of lifeforms that lived 500 million years ago have lost adaptations to thrive in the more extreme conditions of that time. So why should we assume that coral should be different?
Now -- if you have evidence that this coral (i.e., "these creatures," the ones that are living now, not 500 million years ago) can survive and thrive in the new conditions, say from reefs that are already located in places with these conditions and have done well, or from experimental evidence subjecting coral to such conditions, that's great. THAT would be evidence that "these creatures" will continue to survive and thrive.
But until I see THAT sort of evidence, I would tend to assume that creatures today do NOT necessarily have adaptations to thrive well under conditions of 500 million years ago. They might. But lots of lifeforms don't.
I hope you see the logical problem here.
Again, if there is actual evidence that MODERN coral (not millions of years ago coral) can do well under these diverging conditions, that's great. Otherwise, the argument is not valid, since there are plenty of exceptions of lifeforms which have decreased in number or have gone extinct due to minor changes in conditions -- conditions which some random 500-million-year-old ancestor might have been quite happy with.
That may be so. Or it might not be. I don't know enough about this issue to judge.
... that, by definition and your own statements ... makes it highly questionable.
Why? A person doesn't have to be an expert in any particular area to spot an error in logic.
The rest of your post is just disputing facts in exchange for theories
I didn't dispute ANY facts. I pointed out that the stated facts are irrelevant without other supporting evidence. Why? Because other well-known facts demonstrate that the facts presented were not sufficient to make a logical case for the conclusion.
For example:
FACT: Many lifeforms on earth differ significantly from their ancestors 500 million years ago.
FACT: As lifeforms evolve over millions of years, they adapt to the present environment, which may involve losing adaptations to past extreme environments.
COROLLARY: Saying "Your great-great-great-[times a few million]-grandpappy could've thrived under conditions X" has no bearing on whether you can survive under conditions X.
FACT: Many lifeforms encounter extreme conditions at some point during the course of the day which would be harmful or fatal if they were exposed to such conditions constantly.
EXAMPLE: Look at common plants -- some like "partial sun," for example. They might do okay with low light or intermittent light for most of the day. They might do okay if you exposed them to direct sunlight for a couple hours and less light for the rest of the day. But if you exposed them to the equivalent of direct sunlight for 24 hours/day every day, they'd likely wither up and die.
COROLLARY: Saying "Organism X can thrive under more extreme conditions Y for a few hours each day" does NOT logically imply that organism X will always be able to survive under CONSTANT extreme conditions Y.
Now, if the parent poster has evidence that coral TODAY can survive and thrive under the changing conditions discussed, THAT would be interesting, and it would actually be evidence in favor of the point. For example, "Coral are more resilient than we might think: they evolved in extreme conditions 500 million years ago, and experiments X, Y, and Z show that this variety would continue to thrive in such conditions even today." The first part of the sentence is still irrelevant to the argument, but at least it makes sense.
As it stands, the parent post consisted solely of facts completely irrelevant to the argument.
The degree of "doomedness" is highly questionable.
That may be so. Or it might not be. I don't know enough about this issue to judge. On the other hand, I do know enough to say with certainty that the logic of your arguments is "highly questionable."
I don't dispute that human activities have harmed coral in many cases. But coral evolved when it was both warmer than it is now, AND the concentration of CO2 was many times what it is today.
What does that have to do with anything? An ancestor of a lifeform from the Cambrian era 500 million years ago evolved to survive in the environment of 500 million years ago. That has no bearing on whether a descendant (which may have evolved significantly since then) that survives well in today's environment would survive well if you put it in a time machine and shipped it back 500 million years.
Let's figure out who one of your ancestors in the "life family tree" was 500 million years ago, and see whether you're well-adpated to survive in its environment living on its sources of food and energy, huh?
Also, studies have shown that the pH in a given location of the ocean typically varies every day far more than any amount that can be attributed to CO2.
Just because something can survive in one environment for a few hours per day or whatever in a healthy way doesn't mean that the organism would still be healthy if subjected to the extremes of that environment continuously.
Let's put this in terms of another example: In other news, many people's diets vary by hundreds of calories from day to day. Some days they might eat 2500 calories; other days they might eat 1800 calories. But if they require an average of 2000 calories/day to maintain weight, there's no possible way they could gain weight by eating an average of 2300 calories/day.
Why? Because -- following your logic -- the daily variability of up to 700 calories is larger than the average increase over baseline of 300 calories. So, there's no possible way they could gain weight. Organisms will be just as healthy living at the extremes of daily variability as they would at the normal average. QED.
I await your forthcoming publication for a new diet plan.
Music is art, art is propaganda (for what concerns public expression, private expression is not on wikipedia), propaganda is meant to influence people.
Even if we accept your broad premise ("all art is fundamentally propaganda"?), then the specific list of people on the list is seriously flawed. Wagner's music (and to a lesser extent, Beethoven's) has certainly been used for propaganda, as well as having a huge influence on our modern conventions for artistic expression in music (e.g., movie scores, which often are very "Wagnerian" in their conception at many expressive moments).
But Bach's and Mozart's music has hardly been used for the sort of propaganda purposes you mention -- there are dozens of other historical composers I can think of who would be better examples of that. I am not at all downplaying their influence in music history or musical styles, but as the greatest examples of music used as "propaganda" to influence people in general? Nope. Not really.
Note that Aristotle outranks Plato, who then outranks Socrates by a huge margin. Considering that the influence of one upon the other is _exactly backwards,_ I do agree that this list may be an _unordered_ list of very influential people, but it certainly is not an _ordered_ list.
By this logic, the most influential person who ever lived should be the first person who ever lived -- as that person influenced the next person, who influenced the next person, etc., etc., etc.
Obviously that sounds like a bad metric, which makes sense if you actually consider Aristotle's notions of causality. In particular, the notion of proximate vs. ultimate cause is important. One can always go back further in the train of causality, perhaps all the way to the Big Bang or whatever. The question isn't who ultimately set the train of influence in motion, but rather which historical figures have had contributions or ideas whose influence spread most widely. Socrates's parents or some of his random teachers were probably influential on his development, but I sincerely doubt anyone thinks they should be on this list.
Anyhow, getting to the specific point -- Aristotle most certainly deserves to be further up this list than the others. When medieval and renaissance writers made a statement like, "As the philosopher said..." the "philosopher" was always assumed to be Aristotle. He was THE philosopher, and his views on everything from philosophical issues like causality (as mentioned) to logic to all sorts of scientific principles contributed, perhaps more than any other thinker, to the development of medieval and early modern thought. It was only in the 17th century that any serious attempts were made to break away from the prevailing Aristotelean mode of thought on many issues.
And even after that, his ideas have remained hugely influential -- some credit Darwinian concepts of evolution on Aristotle's notions of a "final cause" (probably via Lamarck). Certainly most of our narratives about history are formulated according to this principle: we generally don't tend to care much about why people in the past thought the way they did -- instead, we highlight elements of the past that lead up to the present day, so we can see a "progression" of ideas toward our present, in effect a search for the "final cause."
Meanwhile, Plato (or, rather Neo-platonism) was certainly influential in the Hellenistic period, as well as the early medieval period, but it was arguably the rediscovery of Aristotle that made significant contributions to the renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries. The rediscovery of ancient knowledge at this time arguably influenced the quest to find more (and the later "renaissance" most people talk about), and the advances in scientific ideas and empiricism from this time laid the foundations for the development of modern science. Plato was much less important for these trends (though he still was quite important for some elements of philosophy and political theory).
As for Socrates, well, 99% of what we know of him comes through the dramatic dialogues concerning him written by Plato. If Socrates really said and did most of the things Plato ascribed to him, then Plato shouldn't be on the list at all -- it was really only Socrates. But, as most scholars think is more likely, if Socrates was merely the inspiration and teacher of Plato (where Plato added a lot of details himself), then the products of Plato's work were significantly more influential than Socrates himself. There's a reason the academy was known as Plato's academy and why we get "Platonism" and "Neo-platonism" as significant movements. (Socrates's influence in terminology is usually confined to a few specific terms, like the "Socratic method," rather than entire philosophical movements.)
Hmm... Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Michael Jackson, and Elvis Presley. Am I the only one who finds it strange that 6 out of the top 100 influential people OF ALL TIME were musicians?
Don't get me wrong: I love music. But in terms of overall impact on HISTORY -- I mean ALL of history -- 6% of this list is musicians?
Others have criticized this list and methodology for all sorts of reasons. But this fact alone would have me scratching my head. I mean, obviously the influence of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner on music history has been significant. (Beethoven and Wagner arguably had significant impacts on philosophy and aesthetics (Beethoven indirectly), but nothing compared to boatloads of actual philosophers.) But influence on humanity in general over the course of all history?
And arguably contributors to the written word and history, among various humanists and artists, have had a larger impact on culture in general than musicians. A few like Goethe and Rousseau make the list, but Tolkien's here and no Milton or Cervantes? And if we're going to include popular culture icons of the 20th century like Michael Jackson and Elvis, where are the people who created arguably the most significant new art form the 20th century -- film? Where are D.W. Griffith or Murnau or Charlie Chaplin? (I'm not suggesting they should be here, but the list as it stands don't make sense if it's supposed to measure influence or innovation.)
Heck, where's Adam Smith? His economic theories -- right or wrong -- have probably been responsible for more monetary policy decisions that have had huge economic impacts on society. (I suppose I should be happy that Marx made the list...)
The serious problems with this methodology should be readily apparent just from looking at the inane qualities of this list.
Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus.
It depends on what you allow as evidence. Even the few historians who seriously question the authenticity of Josephus's account also have to deal with one of the most influential and well-known Roman historians, Tacitus, who mentions the trial of "Christus" under Pontius Pilate. And, they have to deal with the account by Roman historian Suetonius, who mentions a Christian leader called "Chrestus" who created disturbances against the Romans.
Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius were at all sympathetic to the Christian cause -- the former was a patriotic Roman senator who referred to "Christian abominations" in his writings, and the latter portrayed "Chrestus" as some sort of rabble-rouser (as well as other details which conflict with the Gospel accounts and seem unlikely to be the result of some later interpolation).
Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways.
Yes, and if we were dealing with one or two sources that seem to conflict with the rest of the historical record, that could be a reasonable conclusion.
But instead we have a number of sources from very different contexts, at least two of whom get similar details like Pilate being involved in the punlishment. And we get these hints showing up in multiple historical documents where the details don't even quite agree ("Chrestus"? -- and most importantly, the details even say things that contradict the Gospels in the Bible).
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.
Yeah, except -- as I said, they didn't do that in all the sources, which disagree. Why would medieval monks randomly insert erroneous information into a smattering of random sources that in places contradict the biblical accounts?
To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians.
That's pretty near crazy.
Mainly because there is no historical evidence that there was any great controversies in the early Church or from the opponenets of Christianity about whether Jesus had been a real person. This sort of debate just never came up. And if you read accounts of enemies of Christians and even those early Christians who had a great variety of ideas about Jesus that would now be considered heretical, NONE of them bothers to say, "Oh, yeah, and Christ/Jesus never really existed anyway."
It really wasn't a question that came up in scholarship until the 1800s. So, it seems pretty crazy that there was this medieval conspiracy theory to plant random references in multiple ancient sources, some of which were even contradictory, just in case many centuries later somebody would question whether Jesus was a real person.
The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
Not true.
Why shouldn't police records be searchable?
First off, many aren't. Why should they be, in general? Police actions should be documented for public audit to ensure against police abuses, certainly. And if someone was arrested, charged, and ultimately convicted of a crime, that should be a matter of public record.
But why should I have access to the records on loads of people who are arrested every day and ultimately not convicted -- many of them not even charged? I'm not saying that there might not be some reason to access them (e.g., to establish a pattern for someone arrested multiple times for complaints), but those reasons usually have to do with internal police or court proceedings, not something the general public should see.
Otherwise, we're advocating a system not based on evidence of guilt (which is determined by courts), but rather based on whatever random reason a cop happens to take a particular action on a particular day. (Usually, the reasons are good; sometimes they are not -- there's a reason we have courts to assess guilt, not media stories or records of random encounters without supporting evidence.)
Why can't Google allow them to be searched?
I actually think you have a bit of a point here about the ruling. If information is actually considered defamatory or whatever, the ruling should allow action against the original indexed website as well as Google. It makes no sense to say that information is too defamatory to be allowed in Google's search results, but it can still exist on a publicly accessible hyperlink viewable from anywhere in the world.
What you're saying is that, since the records are still available somewhere, it is perfectly acceptable to make them almost impossible to find. That's not good.
That's NOT what GP said at all. You're presenting a false dichotomy of the worst sort. There are a lot of degrees between "almost impossible to find" and at the top of Google's search results. For example, you even quoted a passage from GP that said a record should still be available to be viewed at the police office, which is a logical place to look for police records. I certainly wouldn't call that "almost impossible to find."
It just means that finding something requires effort. Heck, if the police themselves want to index their records and make them searchable, and those records are available to the public, maybe they can do such searches at the police station for you. Or maybe they would respond to phone or internet requests for individual searches or records. Or maybe they could even make a computer available at the police station for you to search yourself. Or....
There are at least a few intermediate options right there.
Just because information can be accessed by the public doesn't mean that it should be easily available in the top 10 hits of a search engine. I think there are a lot of problems with this court ruling, but the underlying motivation is correct: you should have a right to correct potentially outdated or misleading information about yourself that is displayed publicly, particularly if you are already guaranteed that right under law (as in EU law, apparently).
The point of good governance is not to trick people into breaking the laws.
Sure it is. I used to live in a city that has a strange byzantine schedule for street cleaning, just so it could hit everybody who forgot up for a $50 fine. I once talked to a guy who had gotten involved in local government, and he admitted that more than 1/3 of the city's budget came from street cleaning fines. Every time there was street cleaning, every neighborhood had a few cars on every block who would forget.
So it is important that people follow the laws, and not just put things so we can just bring in revenue.
You would think that, but parking regulations in many cities do not bear this statement out.
In this city I was talking about, parking was limited in lots of places. Thankfully, my neighborhood was not one of them. When people would come to visit me, they could park on the street next to my place. It was cool.
Except for street cleaning. The $50 fines were more than for some actual safety violations, like parking too close to an intersection or parking near a fire hydrant. (I think actually "blocking" it by parking directly in front may have been more.)
Around 2008, tax revenues went down, so suddenly the street cleaning schedule was lengthened by an extra month -- until the end of December. Unfortunately, we often had significant snowfalls in December, so this caused huge problems when the combination of a snow emergency AND "street cleaning" happened to occur on the same day, meaning no parking was available basically anywhere in the city. (The city waived the street cleaning a few times, but it caused a lot of confusion anyway.)
The financial downturn continued, so suddenly they decided the entire city had to require permits for parking -- even neighborhoods (like mine) that had plenty of parking. Was this to help citizens to find parking? No. It was to raise revenue without raising tax rates. We all shell out a little more for a parking permit, more people get ticketed, and the city makes up its deficit.
By the time we got a couple more years in, the city was desperate. So they had to consolidate street cleaner schedules. It turned out that my neighborhood never saw the street cleaners come by during their appointed hours for an entire season. Cars were required to move from 8am-2pm or something, but the street cleaners never came to my neighborhood until 4pm at the earliest.
Surprise! The streets weren't any more dirty than before!
Didn't matter. Every single week, there would still be a line of cars with tickets on their windshields for $50 fines -- just to tax the forgetful people who couldn't remember the weird street cleaning schedule.
Oh -- yeah, and they used to have an automated service that would send you an email reminding you the day before to move your car. They did away with that as well, around 2009 or 2010. What do you think the motivation for that was?
Parking regulations in big cities are often more about revenue than you think. Public safety is secondary. For four years I lived across the street from a space where city regulations technically prohibited parking, because there was a space between a fire hydrant and an intersection. I measured it. You couldn't park a car there while satisfying safety regulations, yet every day someone parked there. I pointed this out one time to a pass meter officer who was doing his appointed street-cleaning ticketing rounds, and he shrugged it off.
The problem was that the sidewalk wasn't painted there clearly to mark distance from hydrants or intersections. In fact, very little of the city was. Most of the paint that was visible was decades old, and often related to things that didn't even apply anymore.
Basically, so I was told, ticketing people for parking too close to something required measurements, because the painting was often not clear. It was too hard and too laborious,
I think it is the upcoming popular Linux for the desktop.
Upcoming?
Linux Mint has received the most hits of any distro over at DistroWatch for the past 2.5 years or so, after it surpassed Ubuntu.
There's no way to get hard numbers on this sort of stuff, but Mint has already been one of the most popular Linux desktop distros for years, and some have claimed (based on DistroWatch and other sites with hit counts) that it has been #1 (or close to it) for a few years already.
I'm sure others will chime in here with some other data, but my anecdotal evidence is that I know four friends who switched to Linux in the past couple years. While I'm sure I talked about Linux with them, I wasn't involved in their decision, and I don't think any of them had a lot of guidance from other friends about which distro to go with... they just wanted to try Linux. And all four have ended up using Mint. Some checked out Ubuntu but didn't like it, or read articles saying Mint was better, so they decided to try Mint instead.
Again, I'm not claiming this is hard proof of anything. But there's been a lot of buzz around Mint, and it clearly has had enough positive press to pull in some of my friends who were looking to try Linux.
In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014.
Agreed. Even 5 years ago, I would NOT have recommended desktop Linux as a serious replacement, unless the person had some family member or friend who could be "tech support" when something weird went wrong and the fix required editing a bunch of text files on the command line. I certainly wouldn't recommend any inexperienced users try to install it by themselves, unless they were technologically savvy and had some command line experience. (Someone might get lucky, though, and get a system working immediately with no tweaking.)
But today? It may not be the perennial "Year of the Linux desktop," but we do finally have things that "just work" in many more user cases than ever before. I hopped from distro to distro for years, trying to find something I didn't have to tinker with all the time or worry whether multimedia would randomly not work or whether an upgrade would break half of the things I spent hours fixing for last upgrade. Linux Mint was the first to approach a relatively stable "just works" philosophy for the casual desktop user.
I even installed it on an older useless underpowered laptop for a clueless family member over the holidays (Windows had slowed the point that it wasn't useful, and they were tired of Windows). I didn't make any special tweaks other than putting a few shortcuts on the desktop. I knew I only see these people over the holidays, so I wouldn't be around for random tech support. But I wasn't concerned because they had basically just stopped using this computer, so the worst case scenario was that it remained useless. Recently, I heard it was still working great... and if Mint can survive as a useful system for 6 months on the machine of a clueless relative who never used Linux before, well, I'd say that's an achievement.
If you're not working full time you have time to work 2 part time jobs. Hell even if you are working full time you have time for another part time job
Please re-read the first part of my comment. I explicitly discussed this. The problem is that many part-time jobs require you to be dependent on other people who choose your schedule and/or effectively "on call" to come in and work whenever you're needed. If you have two jobs and at least one of your bosses is somewhat flexible, you might be okay.
If both of your bosses don't give a crap and just need someone to be there whenever they call them, don't expect to be called back when you can't come in a few times.
I'm not saying it's impossible to work two part-time jobs. People do it all the time. But if you look at various reports on trends in employment stats, you'll have noticed the trend in recent years toward increasing "flexible" employment, where you need to show up when they call you. That can make it pretty hard to satisfy the demands of two separate employers.
Why does it have to be easy?
Did I say it had to be? No. I was arguing against the Parent Poster's comment, which was in response to GP's comment that a minimum wage was "barely a liveable wage." The Parent responded and said people who couldn't figure out how live on that were "clueless and/or spoiled" and it was "certainly enough to get by."
I then responded to and said it probably wouldn't be that easy for everyone, and I gave examples where it might be harder, i.e., closer to GP's claim that for some people it might "barely" be "a liveable wage."
In other words, I wasn't at all arguing that it should be "easy," but rather that for some people with these situations, it simply isn't, and it's rather ignorant to suggest that it is.
If you made poor decisions in your life (no skills, children you can't afford, living in an area you can't afford) why is it my responsibility (or the government's responsibility, or a private company's responsibility) to provide for you?
Some people are actually stupid, you know. I don't mean to insult them. I mean that for some people it's really difficult to develop good skills that would be worth more than $15/hour to somebody. If you're officially "mentally retarded," you can often get government subsidies to assist you. But if you're above the arbitrary borderline, you're on your own. Many of the guys who are washing dishes in a kitchen or cleaning the bathroom or bagging your groceries would have serious difficulties developing more "skills" to be competitive in the marketplace. I'm NOT saying we should just give them a happy life for free, but not everyone in the world has the same natural talents for earning potential as anyone else.
As for children, growing up in poverty has all sorts of negative repercussions for kids, and it leads to a cycle where the kids end up living crappy lives again. I don't think there are easy answers to this problem, but simply saying "it's not my problem" will ultimately lead to a generation of more kids in poverty, committing more crimes, etc. down the road. Again, I'm NOT saying we should just throw money at the problem, but we shouldn't ignore it either. (Also, note that combined with above -- stupid people often don't make the best choices. That can include having kids they can't afford. But as a society we've decided that forced sterilization of stupid people is wrong. So... well, that leaves us with a problem of people who sometimes have kids they can't afford, and we need to address it somehow.)
As for "living in an area you can't afford," well, it depends on where you can get a job. You move out of the city, maybe you have to get a car -- a car costs money, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc. You save on rent, but spend more for your car and have a longer commute which means you can't work as many hours. Sure, in some cases you could solve things by moving, but in other cases it's not so simple. I'm not saying this one is the government's problem, but it is a rationale for trying to tailor our poverty policies to the cost of the standard of living in a particular area. Hence my reply to the original parent about $30k -- in some areas, that's plenty to live comfortably. In others, not so much. We just need to be conscious of that.
The only item I agree with on your list is health, often health problems are not under a person's control.
How about (4) on my list: other dependents? Like, for example, ailing parents. Are they under your control, too? I made my choice to care for my sick dad who can't work, so I have to "pay the piper"? Also, there are all sorts of situations where you can end up taking care of people -- for example, kids often end up living with aunts or grandparents if their parents are unable to care for them (for whatever reason). Is it still my "choice" to make if my grandkid needs a home, and I don't want him to go to
What we really need is a maximum wage; a maximum amount of annual income -- from any source -- that a person can make. This maximum amount should be tied to the median income or some such so that if the rich and powerful want to increase their earning limit, they have to do things that will benefit all of society instead of hurting all of society.
It sounds like what you're getting at here is close to John Rawls's "maximin" idea, which he described in A Theory of Justice , one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the 20th century.
Rawls basically proposed that we all imagine entering into a society behind a "veil of ignorance," where we have no idea how our abilities will stack up against others in the society. Will we be at the top -- the smartest, most talented, etc.? Or will our natural abilities put us near the bottom, essentially treated as nearly mentally retarded?
If we didn't know any of those things entering into a society, how would we design a tax system? Rawls proposed the maximin principle, which basically states that we should allow the talented and smart and motivated people to accumulate wealth as long as they aren't doing so by making the living conditions of people at the bottom worse. Giving people the freedom to earn more makes them motivated, and that often benefits those who are "further down" in society. But at some point, accumulation of wealth becomes oppressive and actually no longer benefits those at the bottom.
Your proposal is interesting, but it provides no motivation to those who have the talent or discipline or resources to earn more than your "maximum wage." Why keep working after you've earned the "maximum wage" for the year? If you really wanted to implement something like your idea, it would make more sense to make the taxation system more progressive, essentially a kind of exponential curve that takes a higher and higher percentage as income goes up. Perhaps the billionaire is taxed at 90% or greater rate for another billion in earnings -- that's still a motivation, because he/she takes home an extra 10 million for that effort. If you put a hard cap as a "maximum wage," though, anyone who exceeds the cap has less motivation to continue working hard. And overall, while rich people take a lot away from society, their role in the monetary system means that if they stop doing things with money, it makes it harder for the rest of the economy to grow.
$15/hour is approximately $30,000 per year. If you can't figure out how to live on $30,000 per year then you are utterly clueless and/or spoiled.
It's truly sad how many of this sort of ignorant comments a story like this brings out.
The main thing to take note of is that many people who work for minimum wage don't work full-time. So, you can't just extrapolate from an hourly wage to an annual salary. And most part-time workers are subject to the whims of their employer in terms of work schedule. If you're not getting enough hours from one job, it's often difficult to add on another part-time job, because many employers demand flexibility in your schedule. You can't come in a few times? Fine -- they'll start calling someone else.
No it won't be a posh lifestyle but it's certainly enough to get by and it will be in 6.5 years too baring economic catastrophe.
If you're (1) a single person (2) with no kids (3) in good health (4) with no dependents (5) in an area where rents and cost of living aren't outrageous, yeah, it's almost "certainly enough to get by." You might even be able to live reasonably well, if you are budget-conscious. If any of those is not true, it can be harder. If you have a number of these "conditions," even assuming a full-time job and a $30,000 income, it may not be easy.
Even at the median rent level, a worker that earns $8/hour
All of your numbers seem to magically assume a full-time job. Hint: many people who work at or near minimum wage don't have full-time jobs. They thus often don't get benefits, which means they don't get time off for illness or anything, which means you need to factor in lost wages when they can't make it to work.
When the GP says they have to cobble together 2-3 jobs, it's often 2-3 independent part-time jobs, which together often don't add up to 1 full-time job in terms of total wages. And to keep said jobs, you often have to work whenever you're demanded to, which might mean working two full shifts in one day some days, and nothing other days. Unless at least one boss is willing to be flexible, it will be difficult to hold onto more than one job, too.
If some of the jobs are seasonal or dependent on the weather or a service job where you only get called in when things are busy, expect to go through significant periods where you're making a lot less than full-time on that minimum wage.
will still have $450/month left over for food, clothing, etc.
The median rent level shouldn't be taken as a cost of living for any particular area in the U.S. -- obviously in most big cities, the median rent for the city will likely be higher than the U.S. overall. Also, unless you have dependents, you're probably going to pay at least some income tax with that sort of income -- not a lot, but it could still decrease your monthly discretionary spending by maybe $30-50/month (maybe more), which is a significant percentage of $450.
However, let's assume your numbers for the moment. Have you ever had to live on something close to minimum wage in a big city? There are a LOT of things that have to fit into that "$450/month left over for food, clothing, etc." It's not just "etc."
Do you need a car to get to your job? Insurance alone in a big city for a young person (most likely to be working at minimum wage) might cost you $100-200/month, not to mention fuel, maintenance, and a car payment. It's pretty difficult to imagine a situation where you could own a car for less than $100/month in a city. And if you don't have a car, you might have less flexibility about where and when you can work, or whether you'd be able to get between jobs efficiently. So you end up with a commuter pass for public transport instead of a car, which might also cost ~$100/month. (If you don't have a car, though, you might occasionally need to pay for transportation to get to somewhere unusual that you can't get to by public transport.) So, let's say at least $100/month for transport, probably at least $200/month if you really need a car.
Next let's talk about utilities. It helps to have a phone, if you want to actually be able to get calls to come in for a job. Even if you go with the cheapest landline, combine it with heat and electricity, it seems doubtful you're going to get away with less than $100/month total for utilities. Don't think there's going to be much left over for a cell phone or cable tv/internet.
Now you have to budget for miscellaneous expenses, like doctor and dental bills. If you're healthy, great. I know Obamacare is supposed to give poor people health insurance, but so far I get the impression it's mostly catastrophic health insurance unless you pay a higher premium (too high for your budget). Let's suppose you get a magic subsidy that gives you minimal coverage without any premium (most people this would also add a signfiicant expense to your budget as well, potentially thousands of dollars per year). If you just get sick, or have a toothache, be prepared to pay at least something out of pocket. On the low end, you might be able to get away with budgeting only $10-20/month for this, but if you have any health problems, you might need to budget a lot more.
What about other miscellaneous expenses? Need a haircut? Get your
I agree that the US justice system is too quick to arrest and prosecute people, and that many things are wrongly defined as crimes. If you want to fix that, then fix it
Yes, I agree it would be great to "fix it." But even if we stop a significant percentage of bad arrests and prosecutions, police are never going to be 100% sure when they have to arrest someone in a situation where there's a apparently significant safety threat. And prosecutors are never going to be 100% certain they'll get a guilty plea. Even if we don't arrest people for stupid laws, we'll still have errors and abuses of power.
So, even if we do the reform you suggest, we just reduce the frequency of the problem, but still have people whose names and reputations are ruined unnecessarily. You're never going to get a perfect system.
And as long as you have a free press, you'll have sensationalist journalism that's going to unfairly present those who have been arrested or accused. As far as I can tell, we have a few options:
(1) Attempt something like this "right to be forgotten" (which, by the way, I don't really think will work well)
(2) Have secret police and court proceedings (not good for anyone -- will lead to more abuse rather than less)
(3) Severely restrict freedom of the press and publishing information about people arrested or accused (not good for general freedom, also likely to lead to abuse)
(4) Force news media to run equivalent levels of coverage refuting their accusations when charges are dropped or someone is acquitted (never gonna happen, and nobody will pay attention anyway)
(5) Actively begin investigating and prosecuting people who are suspected of discriminating against those who have had a "run in with the law" but were never convicted or charged (again, unlikely to happen)
I'm open to other ideas. These all sound pretty impossible to me, and some sound stupid. But perhaps trying to let someone who was never charged or convicted of a crime to attempt to ensure that news stories about an erroneous arrest aren't the top search engine link is one small concession, and probably the least worrisome as a threat to other freedoms. I don't know.
I think that much of your confusion comes from this idea of responsibility. It's not that google did anything wrong by indexing the information in question
Umm, I think you're the one who is "confused." Let's assume some good faith here, huh? I'm NOT the one making any claim that Google is responsible. Again, here is the quotation I originally was responding to in the OP:
The problem with Google is that they are clearly assuming that US law/mindset should operate worldwide. Google need to get over themselves and make sure their information retention follows the same rehabilitation law that exists already to protect the rights of ex-offenders, for a very good reason.
It was the OP who was overly concerned with Google's "assumptions" and apparent motives adhering to a "US mindset" or whatever. I was just responding to that.
When someone is sentenced by court, the newspaper is allowed to publish that information and google is allowed to index it, someone googling that information at that point in time is supposed to be able to find that information. Some years later when that sentencing is no longer relevant the newspaper is still out there and can be accessed in archives, however the information is no longer to be actively published. This is the point in time where people are now allowed to require google to stop indexing that content.
I'm not an idiot. I understand perfectly well what the court ruling says, and I actually agree that it is a good first step. What I'm saying is that it won't actually work, as long as the information is "actively published" somewhere (as you put it) -- and if it's easily available through a hyperlink on the web somewhere, it's basically still "actively published."
As someone else put it in a post elsewhere in this thread, it's sort of like saying piracy is legal, but the Pirate Bay can't link to it. Somebody else will link to it... and if you stop them, somebody else will... and if you stop them, somebody else will aggregate information together in a database elsewhere online... and if you stop them... well, you get the point.
To use another comparison, as long as the information is still on the internet, it's like somebody plastered posters screaming "X is a pedophile" and "Y is a pedophile" and whoever else in various corridors in a public train station. Somebody else created a directory and posted it at the entrance to the train station, so you could find the exact corridor and location where the posters are for any particular person.
This court ruling says we have to tear down the directory. But the posters are still there, hung prominently in a very public place. Surely if they are truly defamatory, we should be worried about taking the posters down from easily accessible public view, not just about destroying the directory.
If we require online newspapers to actually put stuff in an "archive" that can't be externally linked with individual internal records, maybe you START to get close to the idea you're supporting. But most online media isn't like that, and even if we required that, could we stop bloggers from republishing crucial details, or would that constitute defamation? What if those bloggers are in another country? And, besides, just about anything that appears in any prominent media is reiterated in 5 times as many other links that archive stuff or provide short snippets or whatever. Must Google delink all of those? What about the new ones that pop up next week? What about all the dozens of other reasonably comprehensive search engines?
Again, I'm absolutely in agreement with the idea that privacy SHOULD be protected, and I think the kinds of privacy standards you're mentioning are perfectly reasonable. I just don't think there's any chance at all that this will be a successful strategy, given the nature of the internet. And in a few years (if not sooner), we're going to have to confront the reality that either we have to give up the "right" you want to claim, or we need to impose much more draconian regulation to actually make it work.
You're going towards this completely backwards. The European approach to this is not that it should be impossible for people to find out the past history of other people, it should simply require effort.
I completely understand what the European approach is here, and I didn't say I disagreed with it. I do disagree that Google is somehow the primary responsible party, however -- which the post I was responding to claimed. It's not like Google is deliberately trying to flout privacy laws -- it's just indexing information. If we want to rein them in, then we should, but let's not pretend they're doing this maliciously or deliberately trying to avoid some sort of "rights."
And if you re-read my post, you should find that I actually agree with you. Perhaps I used the wrong word, but that was precisely the point I was making about making something easy to "find" vs. easy to "access." Google makes things that are already accessible easier to find. The original sites that post the information are what have made this information possible to access with almost no effort.
If someone wants to find out your criminal record, they're still perfectly free to ask for it as it remains a public record.
And, you see, that's the difference here between 30 years ago and today. A few decades ago, you'd have to go somewhere and request a public record, perhaps even pay a fee for it if you wanted a copy. Today, you can get this stuff easily -- it often doesn't require much more effort than a search to find the website that has information, if Google doesn't index it itself. No driving across town or writing a letter and paying a fee -- no digging through dusty archives or spending hours paging through the microfilm reader.
You say "it should simply require effort," and what I'm saying is that Google is only the final link in a chain of digitized records that have made the retrieval of this information practically effortless. 99% of this reduction in effort is done by the people who serve up the information on publicly accessible sites, in most cases. Google is just providing the final link... and if they don't do it, somebody else will. If it's illegal for Google to index people convicted of pedophilia or fraud or whoever, don't you think other sites will pop up to aggregate that data for all the people who want to know that information?
Which again leads me to my original point -- if the information is truly so inflammatory that it defames someone's character unfairly, the law should allow deletion from anywhere the public could simply access it with a few keystrokes. Otherwise, it isn't actually going to achieve your goal that "it should simply require effort."
I'm not saying the present law does nothing -- Google is widely used, and this will make some difference. But let's wait 10 years and see how this plays out: I sincerely doubt that this ruling is going to do what people think it will. Either it will only be a superficial fix, not really addressing the real problem, which will be circumvented over time, or the ruling will have to be "beefed up" to take more extreme data protection measures that frankly would have to be rather scary to be effective in accomplishing this task.
When they raid a house and find a kitchen scale, they should not use biased terms such as "drug paraphernalia" that poisons the jury pool and reputation of the person they are investigating,
I agree. Unfortunately, though, depending on your local jurisdiction, some common tools (like anything that looks like lab glassware) may automatically be defined as "drug precursors" or "paraphenalia." Texas has a particularly notorious set of regulations about this, which requires you to get a permit to own things like a basic boiling flask or Erlenmeyer. They even include things like a "filter funnel" or "separatory funnel" on the list -- I wonder if a gravy separator counts....
So -- sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes your kitchen equipment is LEGALLY defined as "chemical laboratory apparatus" which automatically is a "precursor" to drugs.
(As someone who finds things like the shape, durability, aesthetics, and pouring lips of certain types of lab glassware to be useful in the kitchen for normal food preparation, serving, or storage tasks, I find such laws rather offensive. Well... even if I didn't cook with lab glassware, I'd still find it insane.)
This is a little bit different from the 'unlisted number' situation that you mention. At least in the U.S. you have a contractual relationship with the phone company to supply phone service, and you're presumably paying an extra fee to have an unlisted number. There is no third party involved (such as google), just you and the phone company.
But, as I mentioned, there are plenty of online databases of phone numbers now (for example). If you were paying for a phone company to keep your number private, but they kept just releasing it to whoever wanted it (including the online databases), we shouldn't just find fault in the online database, no? The phone company is also responsible for giving out information it isn't supposed to, correct?
The GP was arguing that people have some sort of "right" to keep some of this older information private if defamed the person's character after he/she had served time or whatever. Assuming the GP's right exists, isn't the entity that posts that information in a worldwide accessible venue as responsible (even more responsible) for serving that information up to the world as someone who merely aggregates links to it?
I agree that the analogy is not precise, because in one case you might be paying a fee. But nevertheless, in one case, a company chooses to violate your "right" to keep privacy by not fulfilling the contract; in the other, a media company (or whatever) chooses to violate the GP's "right" to not have your old "dirty laundry" hung out in public. In both cases, according to the GP, there's a company who is serving up public information in a venue that legally it isn't supposed to. And, assuming the existence of Google and online phone databases, in both cases that information will be indexed and made available far beyond the original phone company or media company (or whatever) that provided the information inappropriately.
An analogy is credit rating - they don't lend the money but they have influence over those that do. You need to clear your name with the agency not the lender.
What kind of analogy is this??
(1) The present scenario concerning the "right to be forgotten" has to do with deleting factual information from a database, whereas you can't get factual information deleted from your credit report. You can only get errors corrected.
(2) The credit reporting agencies don't really "have influence over" lenders. They are responsible for providing accurate information, but it's not like they can strong-arm a lender into making changes to their records.
(3) Legally, the agencies are only required to investigate a dispute -- they are NOT an arbiter of what ultimately appears on your report. If there's sufficient documentation to satisfy your lender (not the agency), the lender will request a correction or amendation to your credit report. If your lender refuses to make a correction, the agency can't just change the records -- at best, it will allow you to attach a statement to your report explaining your side of the story (which you may pay a fee for).
In sum, it's not really a comparable situation to begin with, and the credit reporting agencies don't really "clear your name" -- to do so, you generally have to convince the lender of the truth of your claim. If you ever have a serious credit dispute, you'd be best served by contacting BOTH the agencies AND your lender -- not communicating with your lender is likely to make the situation worse and even more difficult to resolve.
On the contrary, there is clear and strong public interest in having someone's past run-ins with the law being available -- so that others can make an informed evaluation whether they want to deal with the person in question.
Please define "run-in with the law."
Here's the problem with your statement: loads of people are arrested every single day for stupid reasons and often without any real evidence of wrong-doing. Only some percentage of them are ultimately charged with a crime. And only an even smaller percentage are ever convincted.
Supposedly, in the United States, there is a right against "double jeopardy" or being tried again for the same crime once exonerated. A legal corollary to that is that you can't be punished more than once for the same offense. That right exists precisely to prevent malicious prosecution that could keep coming back and harassing someone or even ruining their character through repeated abuse of the legal system... even without sufficient evidence for conviction. It is designed to require the State to present its case, have a speedy trial, and then let the person alone again if it can't prove wrong-doing, so they can get on with their lives. And yet what you're advocating is effectively a private version of this sort of harassment: regardless of the legal outcome, we should be suspicious of those who have had "run-ins with the law."
We have media reports every day of people who are arrested and people who go to trial. Those initial bursts of media activity are usually the strongest. Unless it's a particularly gruesome or unusual trial, usually the media attention tapers off... and often we NEVER even hear about when the charges are dropped or the trial is stopped or the person is acquitted. If it does appear, it might be buried in a small short paragraph story, instead of the big headline that followed the arrest.
Media coverage thus gives an inaccurate and often even completely false portrayal of people who have had "run-ins with the law." In years past, the media coverage would have been lost except in some archive, requiring someone to dig through old stacks of papers or microfilm. Nowadays, it is often available instantly with the typing of a few characters on a computer.
There's a reason why we require people to swear an oath to tell "the whole truth" and not just "the truth." Even facts -- like person X was arrested or person Y went on trial -- can often be incredibly misleading without context of what happened later. So, even if you want to advocate that we should continue to be suspicious and punish those who have been CONVICTED of serious crimes after they have served their time (itself a questionable idea), there still is a legitimate interest in protecting the rights of those who were NOT convicted (or perhaps never even tried or even charged, for lack of evidence).
"Run-ins with the law" are not themselves a crime, and people should not be punished or have their reputation ruined for them.