This has been a REALLY WEIRD curveball that I've noticed out on the fringes. Violence doesn't have to be violent anymore. Words can be violent. You can "cause violence" against someone without ever even being in the same room as them or knowing their name. It's all utter bullshit, but for some reason they want to redefine terms until.... I dunno.... it's easier to claim victim status?
Well first off, megacorps are the secondary antagonists of both the Terminator and Aliens franchise. They're why the monsters ran amok if the first place.
But we don't need crazy aliens or future tech to step into the Shadowrun setting. We're essentially already there.
The fact that everyone has a cell phone might seem old-hat, but it's technically one of those "cyberpunk" things from the 80's.
Shadowrun's PAN is coming into being. People's watches are talking with their phones. And their phones are talking to speakers. Phone-banking is a thing. I wish we had better bluetooth mouse/keyboard and an HDMI dock. There's no real reason people need to be restricted to thumbs and 3" screens.
Smartlink is a real thing. Auto-aim. TrackingPoint.
"Annual sex robot convention is axed from London's Goldsmiths university over fears it would provoke a terror attack by Muslim extreamists. " is another real news article headline.
Meltdown and Spectre as a whole new class of vulnerability. And old bugs like heartBleed. Like, welcome to the world "where everything can be hacked".
China's social credit score is dystopian as all get out.
The cable leaks showed us that the US foreign affairs is in the pocket of large corporations.
Have you seen that video of the ball-room dancer with cyberlegs?
Or the mind-controlled prosthetic hands?
They've even given some people cyber-eyes. Literal eye-replacements that connect to their brain. (Spoiler, it degrades over time)
Hell, body scanners at airports (and now subways) are a thing.
"Police Use Fitbit Data To Charge 90-Year-Old Man In Stepdaughter's Killing" Read that again and realize that fit-bits are essentially health monitors. Now we just need a docWagon contract.
There's a good argument that World of Warcraft and Minecraft were virtual reality worlds that consumed people for a little while. I dunno, I lost friends for like 5 years due to "raid night"
Gene therapy is a real thing.
Every maker-space/hacker-space I've ever been to has been straight out of a cyberpunk novel.
That quad-copter drones are even a thing. That they're sub-$50 toys in walmart is cyberpunk as fuck.
There are people that get undercuts ironically. I think pink mohawks have been a thing for a while, but this just kind of fashion coming up to speed with the fiction.
Whoa whoa there buddy... Why do you assume I think you are worth anything in comparison to my life and goals? You seem to have this false notion that humans are all together on this and it's some sort of us-vs-them setup with humans vs nature. Ha, no. Sorry to burst that bubble, but we are not inherently altruistic. Do I care about your life? Yes, but only to the extent that society is pretty handy towards keeping me alive and furthering my goals. Do I care about marsh's? Yes, but only to the extent that I want a functioning ecosystem to help sustain my life and further my goals. Do I care about biodiversity, niche biomes, and endangered species? Yes, but only to the extent that we're on the cusp of being able to read, utilize, and understand genetic code and these things represent millions to billions of years of real-world real-time evolutionary testing. Mother nature cooks up some CRAZY stuff. And the specialists (as opposed to generalist cockroaches) can hyper-focus on certain traits which could be hella useful for geneticists, and by proxy my life and goals.
If it's not clear what I'm doing, I'm removing the question of morality from the debate and pointing out the utility of not killing the planet. I hear "A bunch of bugs are dying" and my immediate fear is that the ecosystem is a big web and that if the food-base goes away that'll hit things further up the chain and possibly propogate to us. Or some critical predator will get wiped out and one of their prey will flood the resulting vacated niches and we'll be over-run with swarms of... locust or kudzu or weevils. You're setting it up like we have to be bleeding-hearts to care about the environment. That we have to be self-sacrificing. That's nuts. No, we have to take care of the environment BECAUSE WE NEED IT.
What's the life of a mosquito compared to my goals? Nothing, but the life of that mosquito could be vital to my goals. My goals are always on top. That's individualistic greed. I don't really believe in altruism. But I will fight for the life of that mosquito because my goals depend on it. In the exact same way I'd fight for your life.
Why the attack on "the west"? You don't think anyone in Russia or China pollutes? That's a laugh. What a racist.
I have a general concern or worry that the existing powerful institutions in our nation aren't accepting the democratic decisions of the nation when we tell them that their plan to break encryption is butt-fucking stupid. That they're simply take another approach and get it in passed elsewhere, so they can utalize Parrallel Construction with their allies to effectively violate the 4th admendment. Case point, both Australia and the USA are part of the 5 eyes intelligence community alliance. This sort of disregard for the existing power structure, our democracy, lends weight to the argument that they no longer have the best interests of the masses at heart and that they're simply doing it to expand their own power. You know, if they really did help their Australian counter-parts to come up with this bill. But how would we ever know?
ECHELON turned out to be a real thing. It had good intentions. Hey, I'm all for our cops working together to catch bad guys. Thwarting Soviet Russia was, you know, a good thing. Their system sucked and if they took over we'd all likely starve. But it evolved past that initial purpose into a global surveillance of private and commercial communications. Power corrupts. And this sort of power can't be trusted with anyone. We need to cast it into mt. Doom.
Morally? Yes. They should. It'd be a real nice thing to do. But... even then, the REASON I put stuff up on wikipedia is so that EVERYONE can go use it. If Amazon is using it... that still counts. This is one of it's intended use-cases.
Tell that to someone whose grandfather didn't bleed in the fight. You'll get better mileage out of that baseless propaganda. But go on, tell us, why is it a lie. Lay it out. I'm sure you have a rational thought buried somewhere.
Yep. Fucked that one up. I meant asset tax. The cludge of property tax, auto tax, you-own-a-Rembrant-you-can-pay-a-taxes also do essentially the same thing. There's not like... a way to correlate them with income tax.
Beginning in 1930 the Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics,[37] which later inspired and conducted eugenics experiments in the Third Reich."
Wow. Such wisdom.
But that's a low blow. The guy really did donate a lot of money that went on to do a lot of good stuff. And all it took was the blood, sweat, tears, anguish, suffering, death, and abuse of the entire working class. The way in which he got his billions was questionable at best and damnably horrific at worst. And while Bill Gates is now giving away his money, we all remember what he pulled to get those fortunes.
I'm seeing a LOOOOT more peopel voting for an estate tax, a higher income tax, and a stronger desire for a moderate amount of inflation.
Remember, we live in a democracy. If everyone imagines a horror scenario of the old rich, we can vote on solutions. Case in point, the age of robber-baron industrialists was so bad for so many people we had a political uprising and unions formed.
Also, disenfranchisement based on age is some straight up "Logan's Run" level of WTF.
They have things called education and learning. And you don't have to go back 200 years. "Gay marriage" was socially unacceptable (by more than half the populous), only 10 year ago, in the USA. And forget about it in the middle east.
If you think old people are inherently backwards and shouldn't vote, then you're RAGINGLY ageist.
Consider how many resources it takes to raise a surgeon from birth through all that schooling, to actually performing surgery by (on average) age 36.8. And then they retire by 65. Hopefully. Physical skills decline with age and there are papers about this. 37 years to pop a surgeon, for 27 years of actually doing the job. If that. Imagine if Einstein and Bohr were still alive. Enrico Fermi, Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman.... ok, Feynman went a little nuts at the end. But the point stands that death sucks. It's a tragedy and loss for society.
I can't help but view anyone arguing in favor of death as some sort of monster. Seriously? Pro-Death?
Obligatory counterpoint: "Free Speech is an ideal that's older than our government and is a super-set of the first amendment." First amendment issues are legal ones. Free Speech issues are moral ones. As in "You're a bad person/company/platform due to your unreasonable censorship".
Any evidence of unreasonable censorship or bias means the platform should lose trust and you should start looking elsewhere. I can't legally force your to host any content, but nothing is forcing me to partake.
You mean like how they got their big boy Ajit (The Agitator) Pai as the head of the FCC actively trying to tear down Network Neutrality? Because those bribes seem to be paying off in spades.
Because laws can exist far longer than any one company and need to be fairly applied to all of society. Start naming your enemies and it's obvious you're just attacking them rather than trying to make the world a better place. I mean, fuck facebook and all that, but that's not how we want any law written. Unless it's a one-time event. Like busting up a monopoly.
[everyone has the right to] (1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies;
"This isn't personal data, it's meta-data. Or it's public data. BOOM dodged.
(2) to opt-in consent to the collection of personal data by any party and to the sharing of personal data with a third party;
"We absolutely give them the right to opt-in. We also conveniently do it on their behalf as well. "
(3) where context appropriate and with a fair process, to obtain, correct or delete personal data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third parties;
"We don't feel that would be appropriate here."
(4) to have personal data secured and to be notified in a timely manner when a security breach or unauthorized access of personal data is discovered;
"Yes, it took our engineers 6 months to close the security hole. That's timely. You don't want to endanger users by making this vulnerability public, would you?"
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
"Yep. There's the text box. Get to typing. Go for it."
(6) to access and use the internet without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices;
SOLID! This right here is the meaty content of the bill that warrants the whole thing passing I will support even the stupid fluffy dodgeable stuff just to get it in there.
(7) to internet service without the collection of data that is unnecessary for providing the requested service absent opt-in consent;
Hmmmm, I'm not sure about the "absent op-in consent", but it's hella easy to justify necessity as "We need to make money".
(8) to have access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services and providers with clear and transparent pricing;
That sounds really nice.....How you going to enforce that?
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
"That's not personal data", "It's quite fair discrimination", "It's not discrimination", "It's not 'against' or 'exploited', we're providing a SERVICE by promoting traffic that they would appear to be interested in based on their entirely public profile generated by non-discriminating computers equally applies to all customers. We just happen to get paid for the promotion."
(10) to have an entity that collects your personal data have reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy.
Sweet jesus "reasonable business practices" is about as vague and fluffy as I can imagine. It amounts to "Pleeeeeeaaaaaaase don't screw us."
Well.... I mean... that nutball's code of conduct got into the Linux foundation. I think that whole crowd comes from SanFran and silicon valley. Ehmke with hat Code Covenant. There's just not two ways about it, they're racist and sexist. And yet they're being defended. It's a sad state of affairs.
But hey, while our fringe might be nuts, your fringe over on the TEA-party wasn't exactly all there in the head either.
I honestly don't quite know what the democrat party is trying to promote.
A lot of stuff, and some of it is sadly simply because the other guy opposes it. But we're largely peacniks, we don't like unilaterally invading other nations. That didn't work out so well. Internationally we're doves and we want everyone to play nice with each other. We like the environment and we're "green". We don't want to exchange our kid's health (and possibly a human extinction event [we... ARE in the middle of a mass extinction event]) for a couple of bucks. We're also massive hypocrites because most of use are still ok with trading with China and exchanging THEIR kids' health for a couple of bucks. We think women are people, gays are people, and even some of the more kookier folk are people. I think some of the party take that WAY too far. To the point where they're attacking freedom of speech, which... man, that USED to be something we were trying to promote. When the jackboots were on hippy's necks. Time change I guess. And we want equality. Some of us also want equity, and I'm not so sure about that, but socialism isn't the boogeyman it used to be.
We bailed out the banks in 2008. That's socialism. We've been in that position before and tried that alternative. It didn't work. 1929 was one hell of a year. And practically any alternative would be better than our current healthcare system.
the old days where both sides could actually work together. I remember how Reagan and Tip O'Neil,
Mighty fine rose-colored specs you've got on there. Politics were vile back then too. You'll always be able to find exceptions. Buuuuuut I have to admit things have gotten worse. This partisanship is tearing our nation apart. Yeah, it just keeps escalating.
I know I'm a bit biased on the conservative side
Trust us, we know.
when Obama won, I didn't see the violence and widespread protests that fall into riots like we do with the left since Trump won.
Stop watching FoxNews, they're pushing an agenda and you're living in a spin-zone. A bubble of hate that swirls into a hurricane. Let me guess, you're very concerned about antifa?
Sadly, a lot of other major news organizations have likewise degraded into partisanship. Just really blatant shit. Turns out that when everyone can get their news for free, the journalists get paid by other people who want it said a certain way. It's not like they were ever saints, but now their whole fucking arm is in the cookie-jar.
I mean, have you looked at the wild/original/natural variants of "bananas" or "wheat" or "corn"? Notice how much less food is on that food.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the concern. And the fact that one of the biggest players in the field is a poster-child for cyberpunk dystopian megacorporations is more than a little concerning. And this time is a little different thanks to the expanded scope of possibilities and increased rate of change that modern genetic engineering provides.
But the alternatives is swaths of humanity starving to death and likely taking down their surrounding social structures and nations along with them.
Wow, I thought that Baxter robot was going to take over a lot of jobs. They advertised it as being cheaper than a minimum wage employee... was that fudged a bit? I could easily see if setup and programming the thing was way more complicated and involved than they claimed.
There's a pretty clear experimental path to verifying that.
"Hey Bob, the code word is spaghetti" *CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER NOISES* "So, completely different body, sack of meat, or computer that wasn't Bob before, what's the code word?"
You could say that's just memory, but it'd be one hell of a big step and it'd likely earn you a nobel prize. Or at least a copy of you would earn it. This is where things get messy. But with enough personality tests they could see what the side-effects were. If something has all your memories and all your personality... that's you. It has at least as much "you"-ness as you do before and after you go to sleep.
Science answers all sorts of questions. Even some philosophical questions like "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". The answer is that the egg arose way earlier in evolution than chickens and chickens immediate predecessor also laid eggs. So some Velociraptor-like thing laid an egg which hatched a more chicken-like thing. But the egg came first. It also answered "If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?" Which I always thought sounded like bullshit, of course it makes a sound. But the answer turns out to be if "no one" means really anything and you can isolate the forest from the rest of the universe, then it exists in a state of super-position occupying every possible state (Copenhagen interpretation) including fallen and not fallen. Until something interacts with it and collapses it's waveform, it doesn't even really exist except in a background book-keeping sort of way. This makes philosophers grumble about "missing points" and "seeing the bigger picture" because they don't actually like solving problems or answering questions. Because they are useless wankers that need to go get a real job. But anyway, if you want to get pedantic science is process of figuring out all this shit while scientific knowledge is stuff we've figured out, at least partially. Honestly the term has really just encapsulated the later by this point. But you're forgetting the most important detail of calling out a No True Scotsman. You have to stress what's missing. Otherwise you've got the Internet equivalent of a ding-dong-ditch.
"The consequence of your stance includes requiring the government to force companies to employ unrepentant Nazi supporters, to force book publishers to publish books that will damage the sales of their other books, to force business partners to work with people they don't want to work with any more, etc. Mad."
I simply pointed out that if you are so stupid as to say something against the policy of your employer, you put your job at risk.
Except that's not quoting yourself. The ACTUAL quote, the words you actually wrote,
"that it's OK to fire someone for what they said."
" It doesn't promise you that you can say any shit you like without fear of being fired by your employer, "
"this [nazi rant] -- in and of itself -- would not be a reason for his employer to fire him?"
Classic goal-post moving.
there ought not to be an artificial constraint that says "an employer may not fire an employee on the basis of that employee's speech, no matter what that employee says, even if it's damaging to their business interests and they've gone through a careful process etc etc".
Are morals artificial constraints? Switch it to "There ought not be a lay which states..." then it sounds more agreeable. Buuuuuuuut like I've been mentioning and you seem to be disreguarding or dodging around, freedom of speech is a moral issue.
Is a company doing good or doing bad if it fires people for being hippies back in the 60's? I would say that is bad.
I never mentioned Republicans, although you did. The OP wasn't about republicans. I don't know why you thought I would think someone should be fired for being Republican.
Yeah, because I mentioned "my place of employment does not fire the people for being republican." And you were confused by that and had to question it. It's so blindingly obvious that questioning it is pretty insulting.
What YOU asked about was "the political views associated with Nazism," and I pointed out there's a lot of overlap with republicans right now.
and after a careful process has been gone through, someone can, in your view, be rightly fired for what they said. An employer should not be banned from doing this, in your view and in mine.
No, you somehow still aren't quite reading it. Let me state it another way: Companies should NOT fire people for simply having a political viewpoint. No matter how vile it is. If you say something outside of work, and they fire you for it, that's a party foul on the business.
An employer should not be banned from doing this
AND AGAIN you dredge up legal quandaries in a debate about morals. We've been over this.
I don't buy the distinction you make between political views and other views,
If I ever made a distinction, I'd agree that was pointless. Anything can be a political view. Or religious.
if someone writes copiously online about the political imperative to commit genocide, that's both political speech and -- I think -- speech that an employer ought to be able to use as the basis for firing them
And there's where we disagree. Because I wholly advocate for the genocide of mosquitoes. Fuck those little fuckers. Big political issue where malaria is rampant. If I was fired for that I would call the biggest of bullshits.
Anyway, I'm getting faintly bored with this. Are you?
Yeah, we're pretty much going in circles. See you next time someone gets fired for not toe-ing the current politically correct line.
It's just that it's self-evident right from the outset that I agree 100% that free speech is a super-set of the 1st amendment and a larger issue. There are obvious moral questions to be asked about,
YAY! Then your statements about the only way we could possibly have freedom of speech involves legally forcing businesses to hire people and forcing platforms to push a message are more than a little disingenuous as this is apparently obvious and self-evident. You should really go back and redact those statements you've made since you're backtracking there. Good talk.
There are obvious moral questions to be asked about, to continue with the example, when an employer is acting morally correctly in firing an employee for something they say, and when they are not.
Well you really kinda glossed over all those and had a blanket statement of "it's OK to fire someone for what they said".
Because, yeah, it depends. Death threats and other illegal actions are obviously fire-able, and actionable at a level above the company. I believe it would be immoral for an employer to fire people for what they said outside of work. That would lead to thought-crime, blacklisting a whole ideology, and a chilling effect. Real dystopian shit right there.
And it's also self-evident right from the outset that I agree that there are a "whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail", because I bloody listed out a few of them in my OP! Divorce, being fired, etc etc. And as you point out, and again self-evidently, divorce is merely an extreme consequence where the other end is that your spouse is angry at you, and being fired is an extreme end and less extreme is being given a written warning, etc etc.
And note that ALL of them are are slid over to "Yes this should be a consequence of saying something unpopular". If everything in the spectrum is fair game, then you're not actually free to say what you want and you're living in a dystopian hellscape full of authoritarian thought-police. Maybe it would help if you ALSO listed out the points on the spectrum where people can say unpopular things, and via the blesses morality of believing in freedom of speech, certain things DON'T happen do them? Eh? Want to give that a try?
I genuinely don't see what you think is a material difference between the position you hold and the position I hold.
Republicans can exist without getting fired. If that's not what you meant then you should probably restate it. I don't particularly like their world-views, but I can tolerate them. Can you tolerate and live with and work alongside republicans? If not, you're a bigot.
I also don't understand how you can both think: 1. that the concept "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is "nonsense" 2. that it's OK to fire someone for what they said. [don't shovel shit into my mouth, you're ripping out all the context and nuance and surrounds conditionals I stated. It's not OK to fire people for expressing political beliefs outside of work.] Isn't firing someone for something they said a direct illustration of the first point?
That's disingenuously broad, a recurring theme here. Consider "It's wrong to kill people" and "it's ok to kill people in self defense". One seems to be mutually exclusive of the other, and yet that little nuance of self-defense makes a big difference.
Places of work can have a ban on selling tubberware to your co-workers. They can can tales of sexual escapades. And they can ban political commentary. Work is free to regulate the working environment. They can fire you for all sorts of stuff. Rightfully. Ranting and making But they should NOT fire people for simply having a political viewpoint. No matter how vile it is. If you say something outside of work, and they fire you for it, that's a party foul on the business. I don't want to live in that sort of society and I'm trying
Slashdot Mirror
This has been a REALLY WEIRD curveball that I've noticed out on the fringes. Violence doesn't have to be violent anymore. Words can be violent. You can "cause violence" against someone without ever even being in the same room as them or knowing their name. It's all utter bullshit, but for some reason they want to redefine terms until.... I dunno.... it's easier to claim victim status?
No, they got clean and they were suddenly free again on Thursdays.
What screams "Anti-social rhetoric"?
Well first off, megacorps are the secondary antagonists of both the Terminator and Aliens franchise. They're why the monsters ran amok if the first place.
But we don't need crazy aliens or future tech to step into the Shadowrun setting. We're essentially already there.
Whoa whoa there buddy... Why do you assume I think you are worth anything in comparison to my life and goals? You seem to have this false notion that humans are all together on this and it's some sort of us-vs-them setup with humans vs nature. Ha, no. Sorry to burst that bubble, but we are not inherently altruistic. Do I care about your life? Yes, but only to the extent that society is pretty handy towards keeping me alive and furthering my goals. Do I care about marsh's? Yes, but only to the extent that I want a functioning ecosystem to help sustain my life and further my goals. Do I care about biodiversity, niche biomes, and endangered species? Yes, but only to the extent that we're on the cusp of being able to read, utilize, and understand genetic code and these things represent millions to billions of years of real-world real-time evolutionary testing. Mother nature cooks up some CRAZY stuff. And the specialists (as opposed to generalist cockroaches) can hyper-focus on certain traits which could be hella useful for geneticists, and by proxy my life and goals.
If it's not clear what I'm doing, I'm removing the question of morality from the debate and pointing out the utility of not killing the planet. I hear "A bunch of bugs are dying" and my immediate fear is that the ecosystem is a big web and that if the food-base goes away that'll hit things further up the chain and possibly propogate to us. Or some critical predator will get wiped out and one of their prey will flood the resulting vacated niches and we'll be over-run with swarms of... locust or kudzu or weevils. You're setting it up like we have to be bleeding-hearts to care about the environment. That we have to be self-sacrificing. That's nuts. No, we have to take care of the environment BECAUSE WE NEED IT.
What's the life of a mosquito compared to my goals? Nothing, but the life of that mosquito could be vital to my goals. My goals are always on top. That's individualistic greed. I don't really believe in altruism. But I will fight for the life of that mosquito because my goals depend on it. In the exact same way I'd fight for your life.
Why the attack on "the west"? You don't think anyone in Russia or China pollutes? That's a laugh. What a racist.
I have a general concern or worry that the existing powerful institutions in our nation aren't accepting the democratic decisions of the nation when we tell them that their plan to break encryption is butt-fucking stupid. That they're simply take another approach and get it in passed elsewhere, so they can utalize Parrallel Construction with their allies to effectively violate the 4th admendment. Case point, both Australia and the USA are part of the 5 eyes intelligence community alliance. This sort of disregard for the existing power structure, our democracy, lends weight to the argument that they no longer have the best interests of the masses at heart and that they're simply doing it to expand their own power. You know, if they really did help their Australian counter-parts to come up with this bill. But how would we ever know?
ECHELON turned out to be a real thing. It had good intentions. Hey, I'm all for our cops working together to catch bad guys. Thwarting Soviet Russia was, you know, a good thing. Their system sucked and if they took over we'd all likely starve. But it evolved past that initial purpose into a global surveillance of private and commercial communications. Power corrupts. And this sort of power can't be trusted with anyone. We need to cast it into mt. Doom.
Morally? Yes. They should. It'd be a real nice thing to do. But... even then, the REASON I put stuff up on wikipedia is so that EVERYONE can go use it. If Amazon is using it... that still counts. This is one of it's intended use-cases.
Legally? No, I don't think so.
Tell that to someone whose grandfather didn't bleed in the fight. You'll get better mileage out of that baseless propaganda. But go on, tell us, why is it a lie. Lay it out. I'm sure you have a rational thought buried somewhere.
Yep. Fucked that one up. I meant asset tax. The cludge of property tax, auto tax, you-own-a-Rembrant-you-can-pay-a-taxes also do essentially the same thing. There's not like... a way to correlate them with income tax.
"Eugenics
Beginning in 1930 the Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics,[37] which later inspired and conducted eugenics experiments in the Third Reich."
Wow. Such wisdom.
But that's a low blow. The guy really did donate a lot of money that went on to do a lot of good stuff. And all it took was the blood, sweat, tears, anguish, suffering, death, and abuse of the entire working class. The way in which he got his billions was questionable at best and damnably horrific at worst. And while Bill Gates is now giving away his money, we all remember what he pulled to get those fortunes.
but imagine if Rockafeller never died.
I'm seeing a LOOOOT more peopel voting for an estate tax, a higher income tax, and a stronger desire for a moderate amount of inflation.
Remember, we live in a democracy. If everyone imagines a horror scenario of the old rich, we can vote on solutions. Case in point, the age of robber-baron industrialists was so bad for so many people we had a political uprising and unions formed.
Also, disenfranchisement based on age is some straight up "Logan's Run" level of WTF.
How do we know senescent cells don't play some other important role?
Clinical trials.
You know, like how all medicine gets made these days.
Duh.
It's the only way for change to happen.
They have things called education and learning. And you don't have to go back 200 years. "Gay marriage" was socially unacceptable (by more than half the populous), only 10 year ago, in the USA. And forget about it in the middle east.
If you think old people are inherently backwards and shouldn't vote, then you're RAGINGLY ageist.
Consider how many resources it takes to raise a surgeon from birth through all that schooling, to actually performing surgery by (on average) age 36.8. And then they retire by 65. Hopefully. Physical skills decline with age and there are papers about this. 37 years to pop a surgeon, for 27 years of actually doing the job. If that. Imagine if Einstein and Bohr were still alive. Enrico Fermi, Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman.... ok, Feynman went a little nuts at the end. But the point stands that death sucks. It's a tragedy and loss for society.
I can't help but view anyone arguing in favor of death as some sort of monster. Seriously? Pro-Death?
Obligatory counterpoint: "Free Speech is an ideal that's older than our government and is a super-set of the first amendment." First amendment issues are legal ones. Free Speech issues are moral ones. As in "You're a bad person/company/platform due to your unreasonable censorship".
Any evidence of unreasonable censorship or bias means the platform should lose trust and you should start looking elsewhere. I can't legally force your to host any content, but nothing is forcing me to partake.
You mean like how they got their big boy Ajit (The Agitator) Pai as the head of the FCC actively trying to tear down Network Neutrality? Because those bribes seem to be paying off in spades.
Because laws can exist far longer than any one company and need to be fairly applied to all of society. Start naming your enemies and it's obvious you're just attacking them rather than trying to make the world a better place. I mean, fuck facebook and all that, but that's not how we want any law written. Unless it's a one-time event. Like busting up a monopoly.
[everyone has the right to] (1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies;
"This isn't personal data, it's meta-data. Or it's public data. BOOM dodged.
(2) to opt-in consent to the collection of personal data by any party and to the sharing of personal data with a third party;
"We absolutely give them the right to opt-in. We also conveniently do it on their behalf as well. "
(3) where context appropriate and with a fair process, to obtain, correct or delete personal data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third parties;
"We don't feel that would be appropriate here."
(4) to have personal data secured and to be notified in a timely manner when a security breach or unauthorized access of personal data is discovered;
"Yes, it took our engineers 6 months to close the security hole. That's timely. You don't want to endanger users by making this vulnerability public, would you?"
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
"Yep. There's the text box. Get to typing. Go for it."
(6) to access and use the internet without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices;
SOLID! This right here is the meaty content of the bill that warrants the whole thing passing I will support even the stupid fluffy dodgeable stuff just to get it in there.
(7) to internet service without the collection of data that is unnecessary for providing the requested service absent opt-in consent;
Hmmmm, I'm not sure about the "absent op-in consent", but it's hella easy to justify necessity as "We need to make money".
(8) to have access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services and providers with clear and transparent pricing;
That sounds really nice. ....How you going to enforce that?
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
"That's not personal data", "It's quite fair discrimination", "It's not discrimination", "It's not 'against' or 'exploited', we're providing a SERVICE by promoting traffic that they would appear to be interested in based on their entirely public profile generated by non-discriminating computers equally applies to all customers. We just happen to get paid for the promotion."
(10) to have an entity that collects your personal data have reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy.
Sweet jesus "reasonable business practices" is about as vague and fluffy as I can imagine. It amounts to "Pleeeeeeaaaaaaase don't screw us."
Well.... I mean... that nutball's code of conduct got into the Linux foundation. I think that whole crowd comes from SanFran and silicon valley. Ehmke with hat Code Covenant. There's just not two ways about it, they're racist and sexist. And yet they're being defended. It's a sad state of affairs.
But hey, while our fringe might be nuts, your fringe over on the TEA-party wasn't exactly all there in the head either.
I honestly don't quite know what the democrat party is trying to promote.
A lot of stuff, and some of it is sadly simply because the other guy opposes it. But we're largely peacniks, we don't like unilaterally invading other nations. That didn't work out so well. Internationally we're doves and we want everyone to play nice with each other. We like the environment and we're "green". We don't want to exchange our kid's health (and possibly a human extinction event [we... ARE in the middle of a mass extinction event]) for a couple of bucks. We're also massive hypocrites because most of use are still ok with trading with China and exchanging THEIR kids' health for a couple of bucks. We think women are people, gays are people, and even some of the more kookier folk are people. I think some of the party take that WAY too far. To the point where they're attacking freedom of speech, which... man, that USED to be something we were trying to promote. When the jackboots were on hippy's necks. Time change I guess. And we want equality. Some of us also want equity, and I'm not so sure about that, but socialism isn't the boogeyman it used to be.
We bailed out the banks in 2008. That's socialism. We've been in that position before and tried that alternative. It didn't work. 1929 was one hell of a year. And practically any alternative would be better than our current healthcare system.
the old days where both sides could actually work together. I remember how Reagan and Tip O'Neil,
Mighty fine rose-colored specs you've got on there. Politics were vile back then too. You'll always be able to find exceptions. Buuuuuut I have to admit things have gotten worse. This partisanship is tearing our nation apart. Yeah, it just keeps escalating.
I know I'm a bit biased on the conservative side
Trust us, we know.
when Obama won, I didn't see the violence and widespread protests that fall into riots like we do with the left since Trump won.
Stop watching FoxNews, they're pushing an agenda and you're living in a spin-zone. A bubble of hate that swirls into a hurricane. Let me guess, you're very concerned about antifa?
Sadly, a lot of other major news organizations have likewise degraded into partisanship. Just really blatant shit. Turns out that when everyone can get their news for free, the journalists get paid by other people who want it said a certain way. It's not like they were ever saints, but now their whole fucking arm is in the cookie-jar.
Define "forward".
So we can feed more people?
I mean, have you looked at the wild/original/natural variants of "bananas" or "wheat" or "corn"? Notice how much less food is on that food.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the concern. And the fact that one of the biggest players in the field is a poster-child for cyberpunk dystopian megacorporations is more than a little concerning. And this time is a little different thanks to the expanded scope of possibilities and increased rate of change that modern genetic engineering provides.
But the alternatives is swaths of humanity starving to death and likely taking down their surrounding social structures and nations along with them.
Wow, I thought that Baxter robot was going to take over a lot of jobs. They advertised it as being cheaper than a minimum wage employee... was that fudged a bit? I could easily see if setup and programming the thing was way more complicated and involved than they claimed.
* Consciousness can be transferred,
There's a pretty clear experimental path to verifying that.
"Hey Bob, the code word is spaghetti" *CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER NOISES* "So, completely different body, sack of meat, or computer that wasn't Bob before, what's the code word?"
You could say that's just memory, but it'd be one hell of a big step and it'd likely earn you a nobel prize. Or at least a copy of you would earn it. This is where things get messy. But with enough personality tests they could see what the side-effects were. If something has all your memories and all your personality... that's you. It has at least as much "you"-ness as you do before and after you go to sleep.
Science answers all sorts of questions. Even some philosophical questions like "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". The answer is that the egg arose way earlier in evolution than chickens and chickens immediate predecessor also laid eggs. So some Velociraptor-like thing laid an egg which hatched a more chicken-like thing. But the egg came first. It also answered "If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?" Which I always thought sounded like bullshit, of course it makes a sound. But the answer turns out to be if "no one" means really anything and you can isolate the forest from the rest of the universe, then it exists in a state of super-position occupying every possible state (Copenhagen interpretation) including fallen and not fallen. Until something interacts with it and collapses it's waveform, it doesn't even really exist except in a background book-keeping sort of way. This makes philosophers grumble about "missing points" and "seeing the bigger picture" because they don't actually like solving problems or answering questions. Because they are useless wankers that need to go get a real job. But anyway, if you want to get pedantic science is process of figuring out all this shit while scientific knowledge is stuff we've figured out, at least partially. Honestly the term has really just encapsulated the later by this point. But you're forgetting the most important detail of calling out a No True Scotsman. You have to stress what's missing. Otherwise you've got the Internet equivalent of a ding-dong-ditch.
There it is:
"The consequence of your stance includes requiring the government to force companies to employ unrepentant Nazi supporters, to force book publishers to publish books that will damage the sales of their other books, to force business partners to work with people they don't want to work with any more, etc. Mad."
I simply pointed out that if you are so stupid as to say something against the policy of your employer, you put your job at risk.
Except that's not quoting yourself. The ACTUAL quote, the words you actually wrote,
"that it's OK to fire someone for what they said."
" It doesn't promise you that you can say any shit you like without fear of being fired by your employer, "
"this [nazi rant] -- in and of itself -- would not be a reason for his employer to fire him?"
Classic goal-post moving.
there ought not to be an artificial constraint that says "an employer may not fire an employee on the basis of that employee's speech, no matter what that employee says, even if it's damaging to their business interests and they've gone through a careful process etc etc".
Are morals artificial constraints? Switch it to "There ought not be a lay which states..." then it sounds more agreeable. Buuuuuuuut like I've been mentioning and you seem to be disreguarding or dodging around, freedom of speech is a moral issue.
Is a company doing good or doing bad if it fires people for being hippies back in the 60's? I would say that is bad.
I never mentioned Republicans, although you did. The OP wasn't about republicans. I don't know why you thought I would think someone should be fired for being Republican.
Yeah, because I mentioned "my place of employment does not fire the people for being republican." And you were confused by that and had to question it. It's so blindingly obvious that questioning it is pretty insulting.
What YOU asked about was "the political views associated with Nazism," and I pointed out there's a lot of overlap with republicans right now.
and after a careful process has been gone through, someone can, in your view, be rightly fired for what they said. An employer should not be banned from doing this, in your view and in mine.
No, you somehow still aren't quite reading it. Let me state it another way: Companies should NOT fire people for simply having a political viewpoint. No matter how vile it is. If you say something outside of work, and they fire you for it, that's a party foul on the business.
An employer should not be banned from doing this
AND AGAIN you dredge up legal quandaries in a debate about morals. We've been over this.
I don't buy the distinction you make between political views and other views,
If I ever made a distinction, I'd agree that was pointless. Anything can be a political view. Or religious.
if someone writes copiously online about the political imperative to commit genocide, that's both political speech and -- I think -- speech that an employer ought to be able to use as the basis for firing them
And there's where we disagree. Because I wholly advocate for the genocide of mosquitoes. Fuck those little fuckers. Big political issue where malaria is rampant. If I was fired for that I would call the biggest of bullshits.
Anyway, I'm getting faintly bored with this. Are you?
Yeah, we're pretty much going in circles. See you next time someone gets fired for not toe-ing the current politically correct line.
It's just that it's self-evident right from the outset that I agree 100% that free speech is a super-set of the 1st amendment and a larger issue. There are obvious moral questions to be asked about,
YAY! Then your statements about the only way we could possibly have freedom of speech involves legally forcing businesses to hire people and forcing platforms to push a message are more than a little disingenuous as this is apparently obvious and self-evident. You should really go back and redact those statements you've made since you're backtracking there. Good talk.
There are obvious moral questions to be asked about, to continue with the example, when an employer is acting morally correctly in firing an employee for something they say, and when they are not.
Well you really kinda glossed over all those and had a blanket statement of "it's OK to fire someone for what they said".
Because, yeah, it depends. Death threats and other illegal actions are obviously fire-able, and actionable at a level above the company. I believe it would be immoral for an employer to fire people for what they said outside of work. That would lead to thought-crime, blacklisting a whole ideology, and a chilling effect. Real dystopian shit right there.
And it's also self-evident right from the outset that I agree that there are a "whole spectrum of what "consequences" entail", because I bloody listed out a few of them in my OP! Divorce, being fired, etc etc. And as you point out, and again self-evidently, divorce is merely an extreme consequence where the other end is that your spouse is angry at you, and being fired is an extreme end and less extreme is being given a written warning, etc etc.
And note that ALL of them are are slid over to "Yes this should be a consequence of saying something unpopular". If everything in the spectrum is fair game, then you're not actually free to say what you want and you're living in a dystopian hellscape full of authoritarian thought-police. Maybe it would help if you ALSO listed out the points on the spectrum where people can say unpopular things, and via the blesses morality of believing in freedom of speech, certain things DON'T happen do them? Eh? Want to give that a try?
I genuinely don't see what you think is a material difference between the position you hold and the position I hold.
Republicans can exist without getting fired. If that's not what you meant then you should probably restate it. I don't particularly like their world-views, but I can tolerate them. Can you tolerate and live with and work alongside republicans? If not, you're a bigot.
I also don't understand how you can both think:
1. that the concept "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is "nonsense"
2. that it's OK to fire someone for what they said. [don't shovel shit into my mouth, you're ripping out all the context and nuance and surrounds conditionals I stated. It's not OK to fire people for expressing political beliefs outside of work.]
Isn't firing someone for something they said a direct illustration of the first point?
That's disingenuously broad, a recurring theme here. Consider "It's wrong to kill people" and "it's ok to kill people in self defense". One seems to be mutually exclusive of the other, and yet that little nuance of self-defense makes a big difference.
Places of work can have a ban on selling tubberware to your co-workers. They can can tales of sexual escapades. And they can ban political commentary. Work is free to regulate the working environment. They can fire you for all sorts of stuff. Rightfully. Ranting and making But they should NOT fire people for simply having a political viewpoint. No matter how vile it is. If you say something outside of work, and they fire you for it, that's a party foul on the business. I don't want to live in that sort of society and I'm trying