Here's something I've often wondered: If you have a custom of throwing people who don't believe in the volcano god into a volcano, how long will it take after everybody stops believing in the volcano god for somebody to ask, "So do we all really still believe this stuff?"
I'm waiting for lab-grown genetically engineered turducken. Or real jackalope. As long as your crazy new hybrids are just blocks of meat, you don't really have to worry about them getting away and starting a breeding population of octoparrots so why not go hog wild?
Actually, a lot of the more popular effective ones a pretty benign to humans. Roundup has very low acute toxicity and "may" cause cancer with heavy, chronic exposure (kind of like coffee and sawdust). The Bt toxin that everybody freaks out about in GMO plants is extremely specific and has a "natural" origin--so much so that organic farmers use it on their crops. It only becomes Satan incarnate when non-organic farmers use it.
There are good people and bad people, good cops and bad cops, good programmers and bad programmers. How about we quit painting with such a broad brush?
Programmers aren't generally required to police other programmers, and the job description for "black person" doesn't entail policing other black people. The job description for "police officer" does include enforcing the law, and they do an appallingly bad job of that when the person committing the crime is another police officer. Obviously, that doesn't mean it's morally right to shoot random police officers, but there absolutely is culpability far beyond the "few bad apples" who actually get caught doing bad things.
It always kind of amazed me that the police unions use the phrase "a few bad apples" all the time to describe those guys. Do they not know what the rest of that fucking saying is and what it means?
This is a good point, and enforcing it would probably result in better rehabilitation assuming the state was also responsible for not wasting the lives of people who were ready to be released. As it is, i think that putting the liability on the state would probably just result in effective life sentences for practically everything. Why take the risk when you can just let some guy you don't know rot instead?
Interesting idea. What's the definition of "only work" you can find, though? As long as McDonald's is hiring, are they off the hook? It seems reasonable if the agreement is something like, "Get a job and we'll make up the difference between your new salary and your salary with us," so you don't feel the costs of moving into a field that makes your valuable expertise worthless. But if they're able to say to a judge, "Well, there's a guy willing to pay $5 for a handjob behind that dumpster, so clearly the plaintiff is not trying hard enough to get a job outside the bounds of the noncompete," then the promise isn't worth much.
That's a false equivalency fallacy. In the west Muslims as a group are majorly discriminated against - at least as much as gay people are actually. The US right now has a major party candidate running on a platform of forced registration for Muslims, turning away refugees and even forced expulsion from the country.
Can you flesh this entire chain of reasoning out? I'm saying something fairly straightforward: Religious ideas have consequences, and if it's accurate to point that out for one religion, it's accurate to point it out for other religions. Do you disagree with that statement? I'm not asking about the political consequences of pointing those things out. I'm simply asking if they're accurate. You clearly think it's a completely accurate statement for Christianity, but I'm not getting why Islam is not equivalent
I'm going to attempt to come up with a few interpretations of the above, but please bear with me because I can't get it to make logical sense, so none of the interpretations are going to be entirely sensible:
1) Because Muslims are discriminated against, the statement, "A minority of Muslims do terrible things because of their faith," is less true than, "A minority of Christians do terrible things because of their faith."
2) Those two statements are equally true, but because Muslims are discriminated against, it is unfair to make one of those statements and fair to make the other. In essence, we shut up about one of them as a type of reparation for discrimination.
3) Those two statements are equally true and equally morally right to state, but we shouldn't make those statements because making those statements would have bad political consequences.
I'm going to guess that you're getting at 3, but if I'm off track, please correct me. I don't entirely disagree with 3, but that's about the only one I can get onboard with, and even then, I can only give it tepid approval. If that's the tack you're taking, we can certainly talk about it, but I want to make sure you're not claiming something completely different.
As for the rest of your post, I feel like you might be arguing with somebody other than me. I don't support Trump, his policies, or his rhetoric, and I think that he'd be very bad for our security for exactly the reasons you state. I just don't think that being ridiculous in the opposite direction is healthy either. It's factually silly, and if I'm reading the room right, it gives people like Trump cover because nobody else sounds to an uncareful observer like they're actually telling it like it is. If a politician says that Uganda executing gay people has "nothing to do with Christianity," I'm going to write their position off as total horseshit. I'm not sure why I should expect people on the other side to let it slide when my preferred candidate says something equally dumb about a different religious atrocity.
Lots of US evangelicals who visisted the country and convinced the leadership that gays are responsible for all their problems and killing them is god's will. Where the constitutions didn't actively prevent them - US evangelicals got laws made to kill gay people too.
If a US politician responded to the hanging of a bunch of gay people in Uganda by saying, "This has nothing to do with Christianity," would that be an entirely honest and accurate statement? Would it be a dishonest and downright repugnant smearing of all Christians to suggest that Christan theology may have contributed to the outcome?
If I was to try to summarize what I think your argument is, I'd say you're getting at the notion that Islam is not a uniquely toxic or barbaric addition to politics when compared to other world religions. If that's the case, I would't argue too forcefully against that. It's not uniquely bad. I'd say that the scale of the problem with Islam is larger than it is with other religions right now, but most of that is probably more of an accident of history and where we happen to be in the timeline than something deeply rooted in theology.
Well, maybe if the US hadn't gotten rid of every democratically elected government in the region and replaced them all with 'friendly' theocratic dictators the region wouldn't have had so many of them.
I'm not in favor of the US toppling democratically elected governments, but what exactly is your claim here? That the Middle East was a region full of flourishing liberal democracies before western interference? Or simply that US intervention contributed to an already messy region full of autocratic rulers and patchwork states? Because I'm totally onboard with the second sentiment but it's hard to make an argument for the first. In fact, my take on the elections for the countries we've invaded and wrecked up has always been to allow them to elect whatever kind of crazy people they want to elect and eat the shit sandwich they want to make for themselves. Us trying to meddle with the elections in Iraq, for example, just made us obviously complicit in whatever tribal conflicts would ever come from bringing in new leaders. In places where sectarian conflict is almost guaranteed, putting our thumb on the scale during elections just means we own part of the pain and suffering that follow.
Whenever a country elects a crazy hard-liner and the press asks the President, "How did you let that happen?" his answer should be it happened because I don't run their government, and we should stop acting like we have veto power on every foreign election.
Of course you conveniently ignore that most of the countries at war with ISIS now are not ruled by theocrats - they are the same countries that, over the past ten years, got rid of the US-installed dictators and replaced with with new democratically elected governments - many of which are secular and now have secular constitutions.
Can you list those countries, specifically? This is very hand-wavy, using terms like "many" and noting "secular constitutions" instead of coming up with actual numbers and looking at the actual de facto forms of government. One could argue that hardly any Middle Eastern countries are theocracies by a strict definition simply because the clergy don't directly run the country, but the reality is one of widespread autocracy and religious repression.
And it's not like the Muslim population have a larger percentage of hateful bigots among them - if they did, Donald Trump would never have been the republican nominee.
This is another very spongy claim with soft equivalancy that doesn't really survive close scrutiny. Among the problems:
1) Again, it's very hard to figure out what your actual claim is. Are you asserting that the US and the assorted majority Muslim countries have precisely the same level of "bigotry" ingrained in public discourse, law, and politics? If that's the claim you want to push, I'll gladly let you define "bigotry" however you want and give you the floor.
2) Electing a weirdo in a primary doesn't really mean all that much. There were about 28M votes in the Republican primary and Donald Trump received about 13M of them out of a country of 330M. I'll absolutely grant that that's an alarming number given the positions he has taken, but if we're to grant that the opinions of about 5% of the population who took the time to pull the lever for Trump is representative, we should look at the Pew survey results on the favorability of ISIS in various countries with large Muslim populations. The majority of Muslims were not positive, but an alarmingly large minority had a favorable view, and a very alarming percentage "don't know." And of course, getting back to my original point, you don't have to support ISIS to be at least moderately in favor of a bunch of their more extreme beliefs about how societies should be ruled
You're right 1% is probably a massive overestimation. How else do you explain millions of muslims dead fighting ISIS and every Muslim country in the region being at war with them ?
I could see that happening even with more than 1% support for ISIS. I could also see it happening with very low support for ISIS specifically but alarmingly high support for a lot of the scarier stuff that ISIS stands for. A lot of conflict in that area isn't conflict between bad theocrats and freedom-loving moderates. There's a lot more conflict between bad theocrats and other bad theocrats who just don't agree with their enemy's particular brand of theocracy. It's pretty typical: wars over this type of bullshit are usually over whose turn it is to hold the whip.
I'm wondering if a simple rule like "loser starts paying after he loses more than 1 lawsuit" is the way to go. Most normal sane people don't file lawsuit after lawsuit. The average person never sues everybody and I'd guess that most people with legitimate suits only ever sue once in a lifetime. It's abusive weirdos and corporations that are the ones suing all the time over nonsense, so a simple rule that gives you one or two freebies would protect the average Joe's right to have his day in court and seriously tamp down crazy behavior.
Most bad stuff (crime, frivolous lawsuits, shady business practices, trolling, whatever) is done by a small number of people doing it over and over again, not by everybody dabbling in it equally. Rules that go easy on you the first time and then crank up the penalties will usually end up burdening the right people and leaving everybody else unscathed.
The difference between paying for this and paying a ransom is that paying a ransom encourages people to do damage that otherwise wouldn't have occurred. In this case, the bug clearly exists already (assuming this isn't fraud), so somebody is going to find it and use it sooner or later, even if this guy doesn't sell the exploit. If it's real, $90K sounds like a sweet deal for Microsoft. A serious incident involving an exploit like that would cause way more than $90K in damage, and it would cost a team of engineers way more than $90K to figure out what this bug is and fix it.
I will never, ever eat anywhere that has dumped humans in favor of robots.
Is that rule only for restaurants or does it apply elsewhere? For example, would you hire a contractor who digs your sewer line using a bunch of guys with shovels over one who uses a diesel powered excavator with a single worker simply on humanitarian grounds? There's always a tradeoff between capital and labor. You could run a McDonalds with fewer workers and increased automation, or you could go whole hog in the other direction and heat the fryers using electricity from humans on bicycle generators. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere for every business.
If stopping it completely now is good, would rolling it back somewhat be even better? For example, if we eliminated certain farming technology so it required more people to grow crops, would it be good for us on the whole?
So what you're saying is that the automated solution will be slightly better than the human currently is? I mean, at least it got the "fries" part right.
The new thing of offering you some random product they want to push still highlights that weakness in the current system. "Hi, welcome to McDonald's. Would you like to try [mishmash of syllables that you can't correlate with anything on the menu]?" Ummm... No? I think?
All that matters is whether it's cheaper over the life of the robot to use the robot than a person. There could be different reasons for that to happen. Parts for robots could have gotten cheaper. Some new software could have made robots a lot more efficient. Or maybe robots are as efficient as they were last year but labor is more expensive. The reason why the threshold gets crossed doesn't matter. All that matters is that it gets crossed and suddenly it makes sense to replace a person with a robot, so it happens.
They're both total cranks. Shiva is very active in all sorts of bizarre stuff. He has a computer simulation that shows that GMO soy contains excess amounts of formaldehyde that he refuses to test against actual samples of GMO soy (something about it being undetectable and requiring a totally new kind of science to analyze).
There's probably a simpler explanation. People in general are vastly more likely to be science students than "sharia" students. The ratio of science students to "sharia" students being 2:1 is actually incredibly low compared to the population in general. The percentage of Islamic scholars is still abnormally high among the jihadi group, which is pretty much what common sense would lead one to expect.
I wonder how much of that is a problem with the actual porn making process (probably some of it--no doubt a lot of shitty people involved) and how much of it is the simple fact that when it becomes public knowledge that you did it, people start to treat you like garbage.
Is there any data that supports the idea that these psychological problems are rampant and increasing with porn consumption? It seems like we have a great natural experiment here, given that over the past couple of generations, porn consumption is up, what, 100x? 1000x? If there was a really strong effect, I'd expect to see it pretty obviously in the data. If it's not there or the effect is only weak, I'd have to ask what other relatively benign things would start causing problems at the fringes if consumption went up by that much across the board.
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Here's something I've often wondered: If you have a custom of throwing people who don't believe in the volcano god into a volcano, how long will it take after everybody stops believing in the volcano god for somebody to ask, "So do we all really still believe this stuff?"
I'm thinking it might be a pretty long time.
I'm waiting for lab-grown genetically engineered turducken. Or real jackalope. As long as your crazy new hybrids are just blocks of meat, you don't really have to worry about them getting away and starting a breeding population of octoparrots so why not go hog wild?
Actually, a lot of the more popular effective ones a pretty benign to humans. Roundup has very low acute toxicity and "may" cause cancer with heavy, chronic exposure (kind of like coffee and sawdust). The Bt toxin that everybody freaks out about in GMO plants is extremely specific and has a "natural" origin--so much so that organic farmers use it on their crops. It only becomes Satan incarnate when non-organic farmers use it.
Programmers aren't generally required to police other programmers, and the job description for "black person" doesn't entail policing other black people. The job description for "police officer" does include enforcing the law, and they do an appallingly bad job of that when the person committing the crime is another police officer. Obviously, that doesn't mean it's morally right to shoot random police officers, but there absolutely is culpability far beyond the "few bad apples" who actually get caught doing bad things.
It always kind of amazed me that the police unions use the phrase "a few bad apples" all the time to describe those guys. Do they not know what the rest of that fucking saying is and what it means?
This is a good point, and enforcing it would probably result in better rehabilitation assuming the state was also responsible for not wasting the lives of people who were ready to be released. As it is, i think that putting the liability on the state would probably just result in effective life sentences for practically everything. Why take the risk when you can just let some guy you don't know rot instead?
Interesting idea. What's the definition of "only work" you can find, though? As long as McDonald's is hiring, are they off the hook? It seems reasonable if the agreement is something like, "Get a job and we'll make up the difference between your new salary and your salary with us," so you don't feel the costs of moving into a field that makes your valuable expertise worthless. But if they're able to say to a judge, "Well, there's a guy willing to pay $5 for a handjob behind that dumpster, so clearly the plaintiff is not trying hard enough to get a job outside the bounds of the noncompete," then the promise isn't worth much.
Can you flesh this entire chain of reasoning out? I'm saying something fairly straightforward: Religious ideas have consequences, and if it's accurate to point that out for one religion, it's accurate to point it out for other religions. Do you disagree with that statement? I'm not asking about the political consequences of pointing those things out. I'm simply asking if they're accurate. You clearly think it's a completely accurate statement for Christianity, but I'm not getting why Islam is not equivalent
I'm going to attempt to come up with a few interpretations of the above, but please bear with me because I can't get it to make logical sense, so none of the interpretations are going to be entirely sensible:
1) Because Muslims are discriminated against, the statement, "A minority of Muslims do terrible things because of their faith," is less true than, "A minority of Christians do terrible things because of their faith."
2) Those two statements are equally true, but because Muslims are discriminated against, it is unfair to make one of those statements and fair to make the other. In essence, we shut up about one of them as a type of reparation for discrimination.
3) Those two statements are equally true and equally morally right to state, but we shouldn't make those statements because making those statements would have bad political consequences.
I'm going to guess that you're getting at 3, but if I'm off track, please correct me. I don't entirely disagree with 3, but that's about the only one I can get onboard with, and even then, I can only give it tepid approval. If that's the tack you're taking, we can certainly talk about it, but I want to make sure you're not claiming something completely different.
As for the rest of your post, I feel like you might be arguing with somebody other than me. I don't support Trump, his policies, or his rhetoric, and I think that he'd be very bad for our security for exactly the reasons you state. I just don't think that being ridiculous in the opposite direction is healthy either. It's factually silly, and if I'm reading the room right, it gives people like Trump cover because nobody else sounds to an uncareful observer like they're actually telling it like it is. If a politician says that Uganda executing gay people has "nothing to do with Christianity," I'm going to write their position off as total horseshit. I'm not sure why I should expect people on the other side to let it slide when my preferred candidate says something equally dumb about a different religious atrocity.
If a US politician responded to the hanging of a bunch of gay people in Uganda by saying, "This has nothing to do with Christianity," would that be an entirely honest and accurate statement? Would it be a dishonest and downright repugnant smearing of all Christians to suggest that Christan theology may have contributed to the outcome?
If I was to try to summarize what I think your argument is, I'd say you're getting at the notion that Islam is not a uniquely toxic or barbaric addition to politics when compared to other world religions. If that's the case, I would't argue too forcefully against that. It's not uniquely bad. I'd say that the scale of the problem with Islam is larger than it is with other religions right now, but most of that is probably more of an accident of history and where we happen to be in the timeline than something deeply rooted in theology.
I'm not in favor of the US toppling democratically elected governments, but what exactly is your claim here? That the Middle East was a region full of flourishing liberal democracies before western interference? Or simply that US intervention contributed to an already messy region full of autocratic rulers and patchwork states? Because I'm totally onboard with the second sentiment but it's hard to make an argument for the first. In fact, my take on the elections for the countries we've invaded and wrecked up has always been to allow them to elect whatever kind of crazy people they want to elect and eat the shit sandwich they want to make for themselves. Us trying to meddle with the elections in Iraq, for example, just made us obviously complicit in whatever tribal conflicts would ever come from bringing in new leaders. In places where sectarian conflict is almost guaranteed, putting our thumb on the scale during elections just means we own part of the pain and suffering that follow.
Whenever a country elects a crazy hard-liner and the press asks the President, "How did you let that happen?" his answer should be it happened because I don't run their government, and we should stop acting like we have veto power on every foreign election.
Can you list those countries, specifically? This is very hand-wavy, using terms like "many" and noting "secular constitutions" instead of coming up with actual numbers and looking at the actual de facto forms of government. One could argue that hardly any Middle Eastern countries are theocracies by a strict definition simply because the clergy don't directly run the country, but the reality is one of widespread autocracy and religious repression.
This is another very spongy claim with soft equivalancy that doesn't really survive close scrutiny. Among the problems:
1) Again, it's very hard to figure out what your actual claim is. Are you asserting that the US and the assorted majority Muslim countries have precisely the same level of "bigotry" ingrained in public discourse, law, and politics? If that's the claim you want to push, I'll gladly let you define "bigotry" however you want and give you the floor.
2) Electing a weirdo in a primary doesn't really mean all that much. There were about 28M votes in the Republican primary and Donald Trump received about 13M of them out of a country of 330M. I'll absolutely grant that that's an alarming number given the positions he has taken, but if we're to grant that the opinions of about 5% of the population who took the time to pull the lever for Trump is representative, we should look at the Pew survey results on the favorability of ISIS in various countries with large Muslim populations. The majority of Muslims were not positive, but an alarmingly large minority had a favorable view, and a very alarming percentage "don't know." And of course, getting back to my original point, you don't have to support ISIS to be at least moderately in favor of a bunch of their more extreme beliefs about how societies should be ruled
I could see that happening even with more than 1% support for ISIS. I could also see it happening with very low support for ISIS specifically but alarmingly high support for a lot of the scarier stuff that ISIS stands for. A lot of conflict in that area isn't conflict between bad theocrats and freedom-loving moderates. There's a lot more conflict between bad theocrats and other bad theocrats who just don't agree with their enemy's particular brand of theocracy. It's pretty typical: wars over this type of bullshit are usually over whose turn it is to hold the whip.
Pretty sure the ACLU is not ignoring civil asset forfeiture.
I'm wondering if a simple rule like "loser starts paying after he loses more than 1 lawsuit" is the way to go. Most normal sane people don't file lawsuit after lawsuit. The average person never sues everybody and I'd guess that most people with legitimate suits only ever sue once in a lifetime. It's abusive weirdos and corporations that are the ones suing all the time over nonsense, so a simple rule that gives you one or two freebies would protect the average Joe's right to have his day in court and seriously tamp down crazy behavior.
Most bad stuff (crime, frivolous lawsuits, shady business practices, trolling, whatever) is done by a small number of people doing it over and over again, not by everybody dabbling in it equally. Rules that go easy on you the first time and then crank up the penalties will usually end up burdening the right people and leaving everybody else unscathed.
The difference between paying for this and paying a ransom is that paying a ransom encourages people to do damage that otherwise wouldn't have occurred. In this case, the bug clearly exists already (assuming this isn't fraud), so somebody is going to find it and use it sooner or later, even if this guy doesn't sell the exploit. If it's real, $90K sounds like a sweet deal for Microsoft. A serious incident involving an exploit like that would cause way more than $90K in damage, and it would cost a team of engineers way more than $90K to figure out what this bug is and fix it.
I'm teaching mine to feel uncontrollable hate and rage.
Is that rule only for restaurants or does it apply elsewhere? For example, would you hire a contractor who digs your sewer line using a bunch of guys with shovels over one who uses a diesel powered excavator with a single worker simply on humanitarian grounds? There's always a tradeoff between capital and labor. You could run a McDonalds with fewer workers and increased automation, or you could go whole hog in the other direction and heat the fryers using electricity from humans on bicycle generators. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere for every business.
If stopping it completely now is good, would rolling it back somewhat be even better? For example, if we eliminated certain farming technology so it required more people to grow crops, would it be good for us on the whole?
So what you're saying is that the automated solution will be slightly better than the human currently is? I mean, at least it got the "fries" part right.
The new thing of offering you some random product they want to push still highlights that weakness in the current system. "Hi, welcome to McDonald's. Would you like to try [mishmash of syllables that you can't correlate with anything on the menu]?" Ummm... No? I think?
All that matters is whether it's cheaper over the life of the robot to use the robot than a person. There could be different reasons for that to happen. Parts for robots could have gotten cheaper. Some new software could have made robots a lot more efficient. Or maybe robots are as efficient as they were last year but labor is more expensive. The reason why the threshold gets crossed doesn't matter. All that matters is that it gets crossed and suddenly it makes sense to replace a person with a robot, so it happens.
They're both total cranks. Shiva is very active in all sorts of bizarre stuff. He has a computer simulation that shows that GMO soy contains excess amounts of formaldehyde that he refuses to test against actual samples of GMO soy (something about it being undetectable and requiring a totally new kind of science to analyze).
People who do projects for the government. On a lot of projects, it's FIPS or GTFO, which makes life miserable, but it's a fact of life.
Or on other peoples' computers.
There's probably a simpler explanation. People in general are vastly more likely to be science students than "sharia" students. The ratio of science students to "sharia" students being 2:1 is actually incredibly low compared to the population in general. The percentage of Islamic scholars is still abnormally high among the jihadi group, which is pretty much what common sense would lead one to expect.
I'd settle for one. Would it fit in the text box?
I wonder how much of that is a problem with the actual porn making process (probably some of it--no doubt a lot of shitty people involved) and how much of it is the simple fact that when it becomes public knowledge that you did it, people start to treat you like garbage.
Is there any data that supports the idea that these psychological problems are rampant and increasing with porn consumption? It seems like we have a great natural experiment here, given that over the past couple of generations, porn consumption is up, what, 100x? 1000x? If there was a really strong effect, I'd expect to see it pretty obviously in the data. If it's not there or the effect is only weak, I'd have to ask what other relatively benign things would start causing problems at the fringes if consumption went up by that much across the board.