Are you serious or just trolling? Did you really just come out from under a rock or mom's basement?
You can't possibly think of a reason you'd want something like contact info with email addresses tied into the program you send emails with tied into your calendar so you can send appointment info to people?
The people one block over got really mad when I told them I was going to flood their block so I could use it as a pumped storage reservoir.
I agree that your "solution" makes some sense, but you have to have a lot of geography and water available at your disposal. With 6 ft of head and 20 liters/sec you need about.83 acre-feet to get 10 kwh of power. That's not exactly residential scale.
Goldman didn't look good in the movie the Big Short.
MIchael Burry, the fund manager who "discovered" how bad mortgage backed bonds were due to poor lending practices, bought hedges against these bonds from Goldman to the tune of at least a hundred million dollars. They thought he was an idiot and sold them willingly.
Yet when the default rate skyrocketed and should have made the hedges he bought greatly increase in value they kept acting like the hedges hadn't increased in value, basically ignoring the defaults in the bonds. I don't know what their actual role was but the movie portrayed them as acting extremely dishonestly. Maybe they were just going along with the systemic dishonesty of the larger bond market. Maybe they were desperately working to unload their own holdings in order to not get taken to the cleaners by Burry.
And I think they were accused of basically double-dipping -- selling mortgage backed securities in the front of the house while shorting them in their own profile. That's like an oncologist selling chemotherapy to the public while investing in hospice care personally.
If you assume that many organizations violate software licenses for a variety of reasons -- either outright dishonesty, poor record keeping or something else -- I wonder how often this gets used for workplace revenge by disgruntled employees?
I would expect the dishonest employer factor and the disgruntled employee factor to correlate pretty well.
I think VMware is actually pretty generous with their licensing terms. I don't think their licensing is *inexpensive*. But every fresh install of VMware and most major version upgrades (eg, 5.5 to 6) enable ALL features for something like 60 days. And AFAIK, they don't do any phoning home for license verification.
A common license used in SMB is their Essentials Plus, which doesn't give you storage vMotion. Many is the time where a customer has upgraded storage/servers and versions simultaneously and I've used the eval license for a week or something to utilize storage vMotion to move VMs between storage devices without downtime then punched in the actual keycode they own.
And it's not like you could necessarily "overinstall" VMware without either a lot of work (constantly wiping and reinstalling hosts) or not investing in actual hardware and storage. And in most cases it would be less headache to just add RAM to hosts to up your density than to scale your node count out. Rare is the site where CPU consumption is maxed out while RAM and storage bandwidth is unused.
I suppose there could be some hardcore cheaters setting up multiple parallel clusters with identical keys but this would have a lot of management headaches and you'd still be dealing with an organization willing to drop at least some of the licensing money onto hardware, which would be kind of an unusual setup.
Given all the special treatment and regulation of the railroads by the Federal government, it wouldn't surprise me if Congressional regulation via the Interstate Commerce Clause wasn't just an eventuality anyway, regardless of the Interstate Highway system.
I'm pretty sure if it enhanced money making, they would include fucking Fiji in the "Eurovision" contest. And their audience knows less about geography than the show creators care about geography, as paradoxically impossible as that might seem.
I work for a tech consultancy and at 49 am the second oldest of the 15 engineers that work for us. I have professional experience with technologies that are literally dead and buried for all intents and purposes and technical experience with technologies still actively being implemented as new in a lot of small-mid size organizations.
What I find with younger coworkers is a kind of full-throttled enthusiasm for "new' technologies which aren't really all that new, just rehashes from a different vendor of what had been implemented before. Where I'm prone to some cynicism about them, the younger guys see them as new and exciting. I still learn them when appropriate, but I'm far more calculating in what I think is worth climbing the learning curve. Basically I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
There's also situational/lifestyle aspects where the younger guys can more easily do the death march out of town projects for 8 days in a row because they have nothing else in their lives, where those are just more difficult for someone married with a 12 year old son and a spouse with a serious professional job.
Where ageism works for me is my employer actively employing me over younger people in more difficult clients or situations where they need some gravitas. Most often the decision makers and management are people MY age, and sending a guy who's 28 in to that situation is a recipe for failure because of reverse ageism -- clients failing to take the younger engineer seriously because of his age. They see me more as a "life peer" -- someone with experience who is capable of relating more closely to them. I've also been in enough tight situations that I can take the heat and know when it's appropriate push back against bad client ideas or expectations.
In that case, I think it's a case of an employer fairly respecting my age and experience.
Should they be allowed the freedom of expression? Of course, like everybody else, but I think it is the duty of everybody with a bit of decency to speak loudly and clearly out against that kind of things.
They key phrase here is "speak loudly and clearly against it" -- you of course should speak out against it. But regardless of the vile nature of their opinion, you don't have the right to destroy their printing press, for example.
I'm a cynic, but I still think that American society as a whole is mostly reasonable enough to make generally rational choices in the marketplace of ideas. I think the general social trends of the last decades are enough to demonstrate that by and large Americans have rejected the bulk of white supremacist ideology. What remains and is loudly trumpeted as overt racism by BLM strikes me as mostly a inbuilt human nature, fear of the other kind of sociological response that doesn't equate to adherence of respect for any kind of white nationalist agenda.
Daesh and the KKK, while apparently seeming to be compelling analogies I think are also somewhat misleading. The KKK wasn't in its most active years a transnational organizaton, did not engage in military campaigns, and did not engage in extranational terrorist activities. It's membership were predominantly part time, civilian members as opposed to full-time militia members. They didn't attempt suicide campaigns in Toronto because the Canadian government engaged in civil rights programs for non-whites and the US wasn't performing airstrikes in rural Alabama in an attempt to defeat them.
I do think that there is an overt kind of "internationalism" to white power movements, but it's largely a phenomenon driven by the globalism of the Internet. So the same way I can start a biking club on my block and make it international by starting a web page, the KKK is international.
So what you're saying is that it's not *really* the content of this hypothetical employee's opinions but whether or not they espouse those opinions in a public forum where your customers may hear them and link them to your business, therefore costing you business.
So really it's the controversial nature of the opinion. If the employee came out with an opinion that was factually true but controversial to your customer base, would you still fire them? Let's say you have a large number of single mothers as customers and the employee said that children are better off in two parent households [and I say that without gender specificity on purpose] and your customers got upset, would that result in firing?
Now what happens if he has an opinion that is broadly considered offensive but not among your customer base? Like let's say your customer base includes a large number of police officers and the employee states an opinion like "The police should use whatever force they need to maintain public order in high crime neighborhoods." The company may look bad, but among your customers the opinion is held in high regard and will have no noticeable impact on business.
The final thought experiment is what if you discover that this employee has highly offensive personal beliefs, but holds them with great discretion and does not do or say anything to reveal them. Let's say he's a secret Nazi sympathizer and through some unusual circumstance you happen to discover this -- you visit his home, and after using the restroom you open the door to his study and discover a Nazi flag on the wall, a portrait of Hitler, etc. Do you fire him then?
I've been hearing this misunderstanding of free speech more and more.
There's free speech, which is normally a shorthand for the right to free speech, which is constitutionally protected at the Federal level and often at the state level and the former is often used to enforce that right nationwide where government attempts to limit it.
Then there's freedom of expression, which is the philosophical concept of the moral right to express one's opinion free from arbitrary constraints and reprisals.
Pedants who use the limitations of constitutional freedom of speech as a justification for attacks on freedom of expression I think are somewhat dangerous. If you believe that freedom of expression is good, I don't think you should ever endorse private reprisals against the expression of unpopular opinion. Censorship and repression of speech aren't good qualities just because they are exercised by private entities, especially when implemented as hostile attacks designed to limit the freedom of expression of others.
I think this leads to a mob mentality that justifies repressive behavior against unpopular opinion. If hacking KKK sites is justified because you believe their ideas are reprehensible, why doesn't that give the KKK moral justification for hacking Black Lives Matter? "Black Lives Matter is good and the KKK is bad" isn't sufficient.
Freedom of expression should hold that everyone should be able to express their opinion without fear of reprisal. People may decide not to like you or support you based on your opinions, but this is a the natural outcome of the marketplace of ideas. But if you endorse affirmative attacks on unpopular speech makers, you are only relying on the winds of popular opinion before you may be subject to those same attacks with the same moral weight you claim to have.
Most systems I've seen described work around a sliding scale where the UBI continues even if you have a low-wage job, which provides an incentive to keep working.
The upside is that the UBI creates an incentive for better working conditions in low wage jobs, since employers will not longer be able to use the economic coercion of poverty to continue with poor working conditions -- authoritarian work rules, chaotic scheduling, poor equipment and materials, low safety requirements, and so on. If these employers want more workers they will be forced to fix these issue and or pay more money.
I actually think the loss of authoritarian power and economic coercion among the managerial class will be a major obstacle to UBI and possibly for very subtle psychological reasons -- many of those people end up in those roles because they are willing and able to engage in authoritarian behavior and they will not believe that motivating people with positive incentives is adequate, that they NEED to use coercive and authoritarian power to get jobs done.
I find the notion that it's unaffordable to be untrue. I think that one of the big problems with our current wealth inequality is that a lot of capital is tied up in unproductive resources. Low growth has caused corporations (and ultimately individuals) to hoard capital due to the low rates of return. A UBI would ultimately end up putting this capital into the hands of consumers, which would actually drive economic growth.
I'd also suggest that it may actually improve economic productivity -- a UBI could put more people into jobs they were enthusiastic about. Improved working conditions and more opportunity to take the economic risks associated with getting into work they cared about, instead of just doing jobs they had to to pay the bills, jobs which they may currently do now just well enough to not get fired. It may also free more of the "gig" economy, but in a good way, where people view working freelance not as a anxious race for the next gig, but one where they don't have to fear not having one lined up. Possibly this would allow corporations to shed some portion of their fulltime jobs (and their costs) for a larger pool of freelance talent.
Ultimately the entire UBI case seems to boil down to the psychology of management and its desire for coercive working environments, the belief that nobody would work, and the desire of the wealthy to hoard capital.
Public opinion was a major driving force in my long-term belief that an attack by DPRK would result in a disproportionate response by the United States.
That being said, the long term trends in military responses and the increasing amount of political involvement in military decisionmaking since Vietnam have led me to question this. The political establishment is high sensitive to personnel losses, humanitarian risks and extra-military diplomatic and economic impacts. How invested is the US business world in South Korean technology resources, for example?
Then there is the global PR perspective -- how many images of dead North Koreans is the US willing to accept in the global media? Broad swaths of the US population may say "as many as you can get" but at some point the US will face humanitarian criticism for killing innocent civilians who were victims of a totalitarian police state themselves (not my opinion, but you can imagine the global left will use similar if not more inflammatory logic).
I just have lost faith that the job of responding to a DPRK attack would be handed over to the military with sufficient latitude to be sufficiently effective and punitive without civilian political leadership intervening and reducing its effectiveness once they felt that had sated the public's initial appetite for revenge without much initial cost.
I used to think that there was a near 100% certainty that a nuclear attack on the United States would result in a near immediate overwhelming nuclear response, the oft-described "glassing over" of any country that attempted a nuclear attack on the United States.
Lately, though, I'm more worried that our leadership is inclined to look at a small-scale attack on a US city as an acceptable strategic loss in a larger chess match of diplomacy and posturing, with endless strategizing, with the relentless presence of lawyers generating briefs to justify any kind of US response in a sea of legalism. We seem incapable of prosecuting military campaigns under the rubric of warfare, only in carefully measured and fully structured
I think the DPRK really would rather not get into a nuclear conflict with the US, but I do think that trying to get the US mired in a conventional conflict would be considered a positive strategic outcome.
DPRK is like a giant warehouse of every Soviet/Chinese conventional weapon system made since the 1950s and they've had 50-odd years to dig in everywhere. It's not that the US couldn't defeat the North Koreans, but doing so in any conventional way would require a massive, grinding and costly application of conventional military forces.
DPRK would probably do a lot of damage with artillery to Seoul, take some initial heavy losses and then with Chinese involvement engage in long rounds of truces and negotiations designed to stymie a military response that would do any serious damage and make the US and RoK appear as aggressors.
Do you suppose that there is a form of depression that is somehow treated by opiates?
I think that might actually explain why some people are able to take pain medication for its prescribed purpose and not fall into patterns of addiction, while others are easily addicted and can't stop. Those who are able to use it as prescribed don't have whatever imbalance leads leads to easy addiction, those who are easily addicted have an imbalance it somehow addresses.
There's probably a third category, people with no meaningful imbalance who for other reasons engage in long-term misuse and somehow create an imbalance, too. I've read interviews with some addicts who describe getting addicted as "hard work" that required a long period of high dose usage before they developed an addiction.
I also think it's somewhat curious how people who get on maintenance treatments (like methadone or buprenorphine) describe it as "feeling normal" as if the measured and low maintenance doses were acting something like an anti-depressant, constructively addressing the imbalance.
I've also often wondered if some of the value pain medication delivers is from the psychological euphoria of opiates, distinct from any pain blocking aspects of it. If they somehow developed a pain killer that lacked the euphoria that it would end up being considered less effective because it lacked the mood elevating aspect of opiates.
It would turn out to be kind of interesting if they were able to develop an anti-depressant that somehow stimulated opiate receptors but somehow was free of the spiraling effects of addiction.
This is all the kind of information you need to have a blackmail dossier on someone.
That backbencher asking too many questions? A quiet talk about some of the more sensitive information in his file ought to be enough to shut him up, along with a reminder how awkward explaining that stuff to his wife or constituents would be.
It's not really about blackmail, it's about cooperation, though. Just cooperate with us and we will protect your sensitive information.
Not really buying this logic -- what exactly have lifetime appointments done for partisanship on the Supreme Court? And why wouldn't we worry about partisanship in the CIA or military leadership, with the former being at least nominally more risky due to its clandestine nature.
I would think that you could avoid partisanship in selection by making his term expire two years after a new President takes the oath, thus guaranteeing his post will outlast that of the President who elected him.
I guess I thought that FBI directors served at the pleasure of the President, but thinking back on recent history it seems like there has always been a continuity of FBI directors regardless of Presidential elections. I'm kind of mentally excluding Hoover, who mostly kept his job because the Presidents in his era were afraid of his blackmail files and he generally made himself into a useful bully on their behalf.
But 10 years? That sounds a little too secure, too much like a master of an empire and not a public servant. I don't buy any functional reason to keep a single director that long, either. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA director don't serve that long.
Surely in a democratic-oriented country changing one's police leaders regularly is just good hygiene.
I think the real obstacle to a UBI system isn't the perceived resentment of people "getting something for nothing" but the fact that employers have to shift to a 100% positive incentive system for employing workers.
With a UBI they won't be able to use the coercive power of poverty or financial ruin to motivate, harass or intimidate employees.
I just don't think the people in positions of employment authority would accept the idea that they no longer had this kind of power over people. I think a significant part of their entire management "philosophy" is based on coercive power -- put up with my shit, work late, etc.
This is probably more true in low-paying jobs because these employees have accumulated less wealth and are at a greater risk of financial disaster in losing their jobs -- or more inclined to put up with coercion to keep them.
It's probably more complicated for people in higher wage jobs. Usually the wage is higher because their skills are more in demand, but they also tend to have better working conditions and less coercively accept employer demands given the higher payoffs.
Part of the obsolescence of the iPad 1 was that the RAM was inadequate the day it was new. I still have one around here someplace that gets dragged out as an in-flight movie screen for my son when we travel.
I always wondered how much longer it would have been useful if it had shipped with 2 GB RAM. Probably horrible from a CPU perspective, but I suspect it would have at least been able to run a newer OS than where it got abandoned and probably a better selection of apps.
An interesting argument, but I think it's accepted more for its inherent value than for its stable appearance.
I don't doubt that a stable appearance contributes some intangible value, but bills like the $100 have changed significantly in the past 10-20 years without much impact on their value outside the US.
I'd also guess that a lot of the US currency outside of major western population centers (ie, traded on black markets or used in shadow economies) are old bills and any new money designs would take a decade to get into wide foreign circulation.
Plus a currency that doesn't change periodically becomes much easier for counterfeiters to duplicate, especially overseas where counterfeit detection is lower tech. Anti-counterfeiting designs using polymers or other hard to duplicate mediums besides rag paper would greatly inhibit counterfeiting.
All crime rates decline precipitously from age 30 onward and people under 30 are *vastly* more likely to commit violent crimes. The homicide rate for a 24 year old is nearly 5 times the homicide rate for a 35 year old according to the Justice Department.
I can't explain what crimes white non-offenders 30 years old might be committing but my suspicion is that isn't violent crime simply because the overall curve for violent crime falls off starting at 30 and dramatically after 30.
In the US we wrongly assign causality to prison. Crime doesn't cause prison sentences, but prison sentences cause crime. Places that reduce prison sentences see corresponding drops in crime.
I mostly agree that we imprison too many people for nonviolent offenses like drugs (my stand: legalize them all), but the there's a circular quality to your reasoning that would seem to imply that the majority of violent offenders were originally imprisoned for petty non-violent first time offenses and that they came out violent recidivists.
The counterfactual stance is that many first time offenders were convicted of violent crimes to begin with; that they are violent recidivists after they get out may also be true, but if their original crime was a crime of violence, it's hard to reason why they shouldn't have been imprisoned in the first place.
I think you also have an implication that they were imprisoned originally for wholly unjust reasons (falsified evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, or other rights violations). I'm willing to accept this might explain some of the higher level of crime, but not enough of it to explain the trend as a whole.
I'm also not sure how "not imprisoning people at all" is a legitimate strategy for fixing the obvious problems in Black communities. Eliminating convictions for drug offenses may be a start, but just last weekend where I live there were two people killed in a confrontation in a park (victims and perpetrators both black) and within 2 days there was a surge of reprisal shootings and at least one murder linked to the original event. Something is broken in Black communities and not putting violent offenders in prison isn't going to fix it.
The currency needs a whole new design, period. More color, translucent holograms, clear windows,etc. American currency is ridiculously old fashioned and the Federalist design style is too stuffy. And any redesign should involve regular refreshes of featured items, whether it's people or natural wonders or engineering achievements.
Tell us what percentage of black males 30 years of age have no convictions at all. Do the same for white males.
Most of your effect anyway is probably due to the fact that if black males haven't been convicted of anything by age 30, they're not likely to be convicted of anything because all criminal behavior drops off substantially from around age 30 on. They're not criminally inclined and they are unlikely to become more criminally inclined.
I'd also like to see the distribution of crimes white males are convicted of. How many are violent felonies? And for your group of more highly convicted black offenders, how many are violent felonies?
Just looking at police stats for my city alone seems to reinforce the idea that blacks have a higher rate of criminality. Predominantly black precincts have higher rates of homicide and violent crime involving firearms than any other area of the city.
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Are you serious or just trolling? Did you really just come out from under a rock or mom's basement?
You can't possibly think of a reason you'd want something like contact info with email addresses tied into the program you send emails with tied into your calendar so you can send appointment info to people?
The people one block over got really mad when I told them I was going to flood their block so I could use it as a pumped storage reservoir.
I agree that your "solution" makes some sense, but you have to have a lot of geography and water available at your disposal. With 6 ft of head and 20 liters/sec you need about .83 acre-feet to get 10 kwh of power. That's not exactly residential scale.
Goldman didn't look good in the movie the Big Short.
MIchael Burry, the fund manager who "discovered" how bad mortgage backed bonds were due to poor lending practices, bought hedges against these bonds from Goldman to the tune of at least a hundred million dollars. They thought he was an idiot and sold them willingly.
Yet when the default rate skyrocketed and should have made the hedges he bought greatly increase in value they kept acting like the hedges hadn't increased in value, basically ignoring the defaults in the bonds. I don't know what their actual role was but the movie portrayed them as acting extremely dishonestly. Maybe they were just going along with the systemic dishonesty of the larger bond market. Maybe they were desperately working to unload their own holdings in order to not get taken to the cleaners by Burry.
And I think they were accused of basically double-dipping -- selling mortgage backed securities in the front of the house while shorting them in their own profile. That's like an oncologist selling chemotherapy to the public while investing in hospice care personally.
If you assume that many organizations violate software licenses for a variety of reasons -- either outright dishonesty, poor record keeping or something else -- I wonder how often this gets used for workplace revenge by disgruntled employees?
I would expect the dishonest employer factor and the disgruntled employee factor to correlate pretty well.
I think VMware is actually pretty generous with their licensing terms. I don't think their licensing is *inexpensive*. But every fresh install of VMware and most major version upgrades (eg, 5.5 to 6) enable ALL features for something like 60 days. And AFAIK, they don't do any phoning home for license verification.
A common license used in SMB is their Essentials Plus, which doesn't give you storage vMotion. Many is the time where a customer has upgraded storage/servers and versions simultaneously and I've used the eval license for a week or something to utilize storage vMotion to move VMs between storage devices without downtime then punched in the actual keycode they own.
And it's not like you could necessarily "overinstall" VMware without either a lot of work (constantly wiping and reinstalling hosts) or not investing in actual hardware and storage. And in most cases it would be less headache to just add RAM to hosts to up your density than to scale your node count out. Rare is the site where CPU consumption is maxed out while RAM and storage bandwidth is unused.
I suppose there could be some hardcore cheaters setting up multiple parallel clusters with identical keys but this would have a lot of management headaches and you'd still be dealing with an organization willing to drop at least some of the licensing money onto hardware, which would be kind of an unusual setup.
Given all the special treatment and regulation of the railroads by the Federal government, it wouldn't surprise me if Congressional regulation via the Interstate Commerce Clause wasn't just an eventuality anyway, regardless of the Interstate Highway system.
Your ideas intrigue me and I want to subscribe to your newsletter.
But I'm curious how interstate regulation didn't apply to interstate rail traffic.
Thanks, and I'll listen to my answer off the air.
I'm pretty sure if it enhanced money making, they would include fucking Fiji in the "Eurovision" contest. And their audience knows less about geography than the show creators care about geography, as paradoxically impossible as that might seem.
I work for a tech consultancy and at 49 am the second oldest of the 15 engineers that work for us. I have professional experience with technologies that are literally dead and buried for all intents and purposes and technical experience with technologies still actively being implemented as new in a lot of small-mid size organizations.
What I find with younger coworkers is a kind of full-throttled enthusiasm for "new' technologies which aren't really all that new, just rehashes from a different vendor of what had been implemented before. Where I'm prone to some cynicism about them, the younger guys see them as new and exciting. I still learn them when appropriate, but I'm far more calculating in what I think is worth climbing the learning curve. Basically I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
There's also situational/lifestyle aspects where the younger guys can more easily do the death march out of town projects for 8 days in a row because they have nothing else in their lives, where those are just more difficult for someone married with a 12 year old son and a spouse with a serious professional job.
Where ageism works for me is my employer actively employing me over younger people in more difficult clients or situations where they need some gravitas. Most often the decision makers and management are people MY age, and sending a guy who's 28 in to that situation is a recipe for failure because of reverse ageism -- clients failing to take the younger engineer seriously because of his age. They see me more as a "life peer" -- someone with experience who is capable of relating more closely to them. I've also been in enough tight situations that I can take the heat and know when it's appropriate push back against bad client ideas or expectations.
In that case, I think it's a case of an employer fairly respecting my age and experience.
Should they be allowed the freedom of expression? Of course, like everybody else, but I think it is the duty of everybody with a bit of decency to speak loudly and clearly out against that kind of things.
They key phrase here is "speak loudly and clearly against it" -- you of course should speak out against it. But regardless of the vile nature of their opinion, you don't have the right to destroy their printing press, for example.
I'm a cynic, but I still think that American society as a whole is mostly reasonable enough to make generally rational choices in the marketplace of ideas. I think the general social trends of the last decades are enough to demonstrate that by and large Americans have rejected the bulk of white supremacist ideology. What remains and is loudly trumpeted as overt racism by BLM strikes me as mostly a inbuilt human nature, fear of the other kind of sociological response that doesn't equate to adherence of respect for any kind of white nationalist agenda.
Daesh and the KKK, while apparently seeming to be compelling analogies I think are also somewhat misleading. The KKK wasn't in its most active years a transnational organizaton, did not engage in military campaigns, and did not engage in extranational terrorist activities. It's membership were predominantly part time, civilian members as opposed to full-time militia members. They didn't attempt suicide campaigns in Toronto because the Canadian government engaged in civil rights programs for non-whites and the US wasn't performing airstrikes in rural Alabama in an attempt to defeat them.
I do think that there is an overt kind of "internationalism" to white power movements, but it's largely a phenomenon driven by the globalism of the Internet. So the same way I can start a biking club on my block and make it international by starting a web page, the KKK is international.
So what you're saying is that it's not *really* the content of this hypothetical employee's opinions but whether or not they espouse those opinions in a public forum where your customers may hear them and link them to your business, therefore costing you business.
So really it's the controversial nature of the opinion. If the employee came out with an opinion that was factually true but controversial to your customer base, would you still fire them? Let's say you have a large number of single mothers as customers and the employee said that children are better off in two parent households [and I say that without gender specificity on purpose] and your customers got upset, would that result in firing?
Now what happens if he has an opinion that is broadly considered offensive but not among your customer base? Like let's say your customer base includes a large number of police officers and the employee states an opinion like "The police should use whatever force they need to maintain public order in high crime neighborhoods." The company may look bad, but among your customers the opinion is held in high regard and will have no noticeable impact on business.
The final thought experiment is what if you discover that this employee has highly offensive personal beliefs, but holds them with great discretion and does not do or say anything to reveal them. Let's say he's a secret Nazi sympathizer and through some unusual circumstance you happen to discover this -- you visit his home, and after using the restroom you open the door to his study and discover a Nazi flag on the wall, a portrait of Hitler, etc. Do you fire him then?
I've been hearing this misunderstanding of free speech more and more.
There's free speech, which is normally a shorthand for the right to free speech, which is constitutionally protected at the Federal level and often at the state level and the former is often used to enforce that right nationwide where government attempts to limit it.
Then there's freedom of expression, which is the philosophical concept of the moral right to express one's opinion free from arbitrary constraints and reprisals.
Pedants who use the limitations of constitutional freedom of speech as a justification for attacks on freedom of expression I think are somewhat dangerous. If you believe that freedom of expression is good, I don't think you should ever endorse private reprisals against the expression of unpopular opinion. Censorship and repression of speech aren't good qualities just because they are exercised by private entities, especially when implemented as hostile attacks designed to limit the freedom of expression of others.
I think this leads to a mob mentality that justifies repressive behavior against unpopular opinion. If hacking KKK sites is justified because you believe their ideas are reprehensible, why doesn't that give the KKK moral justification for hacking Black Lives Matter? "Black Lives Matter is good and the KKK is bad" isn't sufficient.
Freedom of expression should hold that everyone should be able to express their opinion without fear of reprisal. People may decide not to like you or support you based on your opinions, but this is a the natural outcome of the marketplace of ideas. But if you endorse affirmative attacks on unpopular speech makers, you are only relying on the winds of popular opinion before you may be subject to those same attacks with the same moral weight you claim to have.
Most systems I've seen described work around a sliding scale where the UBI continues even if you have a low-wage job, which provides an incentive to keep working.
The upside is that the UBI creates an incentive for better working conditions in low wage jobs, since employers will not longer be able to use the economic coercion of poverty to continue with poor working conditions -- authoritarian work rules, chaotic scheduling, poor equipment and materials, low safety requirements, and so on. If these employers want more workers they will be forced to fix these issue and or pay more money.
I actually think the loss of authoritarian power and economic coercion among the managerial class will be a major obstacle to UBI and possibly for very subtle psychological reasons -- many of those people end up in those roles because they are willing and able to engage in authoritarian behavior and they will not believe that motivating people with positive incentives is adequate, that they NEED to use coercive and authoritarian power to get jobs done.
I find the notion that it's unaffordable to be untrue. I think that one of the big problems with our current wealth inequality is that a lot of capital is tied up in unproductive resources. Low growth has caused corporations (and ultimately individuals) to hoard capital due to the low rates of return. A UBI would ultimately end up putting this capital into the hands of consumers, which would actually drive economic growth.
I'd also suggest that it may actually improve economic productivity -- a UBI could put more people into jobs they were enthusiastic about. Improved working conditions and more opportunity to take the economic risks associated with getting into work they cared about, instead of just doing jobs they had to to pay the bills, jobs which they may currently do now just well enough to not get fired. It may also free more of the "gig" economy, but in a good way, where people view working freelance not as a anxious race for the next gig, but one where they don't have to fear not having one lined up. Possibly this would allow corporations to shed some portion of their fulltime jobs (and their costs) for a larger pool of freelance talent.
Ultimately the entire UBI case seems to boil down to the psychology of management and its desire for coercive working environments, the belief that nobody would work, and the desire of the wealthy to hoard capital.
Public opinion was a major driving force in my long-term belief that an attack by DPRK would result in a disproportionate response by the United States.
That being said, the long term trends in military responses and the increasing amount of political involvement in military decisionmaking since Vietnam have led me to question this. The political establishment is high sensitive to personnel losses, humanitarian risks and extra-military diplomatic and economic impacts. How invested is the US business world in South Korean technology resources, for example?
Then there is the global PR perspective -- how many images of dead North Koreans is the US willing to accept in the global media? Broad swaths of the US population may say "as many as you can get" but at some point the US will face humanitarian criticism for killing innocent civilians who were victims of a totalitarian police state themselves (not my opinion, but you can imagine the global left will use similar if not more inflammatory logic).
I just have lost faith that the job of responding to a DPRK attack would be handed over to the military with sufficient latitude to be sufficiently effective and punitive without civilian political leadership intervening and reducing its effectiveness once they felt that had sated the public's initial appetite for revenge without much initial cost.
I used to think that there was a near 100% certainty that a nuclear attack on the United States would result in a near immediate overwhelming nuclear response, the oft-described "glassing over" of any country that attempted a nuclear attack on the United States.
Lately, though, I'm more worried that our leadership is inclined to look at a small-scale attack on a US city as an acceptable strategic loss in a larger chess match of diplomacy and posturing, with endless strategizing, with the relentless presence of lawyers generating briefs to justify any kind of US response in a sea of legalism. We seem incapable of prosecuting military campaigns under the rubric of warfare, only in carefully measured and fully structured
I think the DPRK really would rather not get into a nuclear conflict with the US, but I do think that trying to get the US mired in a conventional conflict would be considered a positive strategic outcome.
DPRK is like a giant warehouse of every Soviet/Chinese conventional weapon system made since the 1950s and they've had 50-odd years to dig in everywhere. It's not that the US couldn't defeat the North Koreans, but doing so in any conventional way would require a massive, grinding and costly application of conventional military forces.
DPRK would probably do a lot of damage with artillery to Seoul, take some initial heavy losses and then with Chinese involvement engage in long rounds of truces and negotiations designed to stymie a military response that would do any serious damage and make the US and RoK appear as aggressors.
Do you suppose that there is a form of depression that is somehow treated by opiates?
I think that might actually explain why some people are able to take pain medication for its prescribed purpose and not fall into patterns of addiction, while others are easily addicted and can't stop. Those who are able to use it as prescribed don't have whatever imbalance leads leads to easy addiction, those who are easily addicted have an imbalance it somehow addresses.
There's probably a third category, people with no meaningful imbalance who for other reasons engage in long-term misuse and somehow create an imbalance, too. I've read interviews with some addicts who describe getting addicted as "hard work" that required a long period of high dose usage before they developed an addiction.
I also think it's somewhat curious how people who get on maintenance treatments (like methadone or buprenorphine) describe it as "feeling normal" as if the measured and low maintenance doses were acting something like an anti-depressant, constructively addressing the imbalance.
I've also often wondered if some of the value pain medication delivers is from the psychological euphoria of opiates, distinct from any pain blocking aspects of it. If they somehow developed a pain killer that lacked the euphoria that it would end up being considered less effective because it lacked the mood elevating aspect of opiates.
It would turn out to be kind of interesting if they were able to develop an anti-depressant that somehow stimulated opiate receptors but somehow was free of the spiraling effects of addiction.
This is all the kind of information you need to have a blackmail dossier on someone.
That backbencher asking too many questions? A quiet talk about some of the more sensitive information in his file ought to be enough to shut him up, along with a reminder how awkward explaining that stuff to his wife or constituents would be.
It's not really about blackmail, it's about cooperation, though. Just cooperate with us and we will protect your sensitive information.
Not really buying this logic -- what exactly have lifetime appointments done for partisanship on the Supreme Court? And why wouldn't we worry about partisanship in the CIA or military leadership, with the former being at least nominally more risky due to its clandestine nature.
I would think that you could avoid partisanship in selection by making his term expire two years after a new President takes the oath, thus guaranteeing his post will outlast that of the President who elected him.
I guess I thought that FBI directors served at the pleasure of the President, but thinking back on recent history it seems like there has always been a continuity of FBI directors regardless of Presidential elections. I'm kind of mentally excluding Hoover, who mostly kept his job because the Presidents in his era were afraid of his blackmail files and he generally made himself into a useful bully on their behalf.
But 10 years? That sounds a little too secure, too much like a master of an empire and not a public servant. I don't buy any functional reason to keep a single director that long, either. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA director don't serve that long.
Surely in a democratic-oriented country changing one's police leaders regularly is just good hygiene.
I think the real obstacle to a UBI system isn't the perceived resentment of people "getting something for nothing" but the fact that employers have to shift to a 100% positive incentive system for employing workers.
With a UBI they won't be able to use the coercive power of poverty or financial ruin to motivate, harass or intimidate employees.
I just don't think the people in positions of employment authority would accept the idea that they no longer had this kind of power over people. I think a significant part of their entire management "philosophy" is based on coercive power -- put up with my shit, work late, etc.
This is probably more true in low-paying jobs because these employees have accumulated less wealth and are at a greater risk of financial disaster in losing their jobs -- or more inclined to put up with coercion to keep them.
It's probably more complicated for people in higher wage jobs. Usually the wage is higher because their skills are more in demand, but they also tend to have better working conditions and less coercively accept employer demands given the higher payoffs.
Part of the obsolescence of the iPad 1 was that the RAM was inadequate the day it was new. I still have one around here someplace that gets dragged out as an in-flight movie screen for my son when we travel.
I always wondered how much longer it would have been useful if it had shipped with 2 GB RAM. Probably horrible from a CPU perspective, but I suspect it would have at least been able to run a newer OS than where it got abandoned and probably a better selection of apps.
An interesting argument, but I think it's accepted more for its inherent value than for its stable appearance.
I don't doubt that a stable appearance contributes some intangible value, but bills like the $100 have changed significantly in the past 10-20 years without much impact on their value outside the US.
I'd also guess that a lot of the US currency outside of major western population centers (ie, traded on black markets or used in shadow economies) are old bills and any new money designs would take a decade to get into wide foreign circulation.
Plus a currency that doesn't change periodically becomes much easier for counterfeiters to duplicate, especially overseas where counterfeit detection is lower tech. Anti-counterfeiting designs using polymers or other hard to duplicate mediums besides rag paper would greatly inhibit counterfeiting.
All crime rates decline precipitously from age 30 onward and people under 30 are *vastly* more likely to commit violent crimes. The homicide rate for a 24 year old is nearly 5 times the homicide rate for a 35 year old according to the Justice Department.
I can't explain what crimes white non-offenders 30 years old might be committing but my suspicion is that isn't violent crime simply because the overall curve for violent crime falls off starting at 30 and dramatically after 30.
In the US we wrongly assign causality to prison. Crime doesn't cause prison sentences, but prison sentences cause crime. Places that reduce prison sentences see corresponding drops in crime.
I mostly agree that we imprison too many people for nonviolent offenses like drugs (my stand: legalize them all), but the there's a circular quality to your reasoning that would seem to imply that the majority of violent offenders were originally imprisoned for petty non-violent first time offenses and that they came out violent recidivists.
The counterfactual stance is that many first time offenders were convicted of violent crimes to begin with; that they are violent recidivists after they get out may also be true, but if their original crime was a crime of violence, it's hard to reason why they shouldn't have been imprisoned in the first place.
I think you also have an implication that they were imprisoned originally for wholly unjust reasons (falsified evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, or other rights violations). I'm willing to accept this might explain some of the higher level of crime, but not enough of it to explain the trend as a whole.
I'm also not sure how "not imprisoning people at all" is a legitimate strategy for fixing the obvious problems in Black communities. Eliminating convictions for drug offenses may be a start, but just last weekend where I live there were two people killed in a confrontation in a park (victims and perpetrators both black) and within 2 days there was a surge of reprisal shootings and at least one murder linked to the original event. Something is broken in Black communities and not putting violent offenders in prison isn't going to fix it.
The currency needs a whole new design, period. More color, translucent holograms, clear windows,etc. American currency is ridiculously old fashioned and the Federalist design style is too stuffy. And any redesign should involve regular refreshes of featured items, whether it's people or natural wonders or engineering achievements.
You're cherry picking statistics.
Tell us what percentage of black males 30 years of age have no convictions at all. Do the same for white males.
Most of your effect anyway is probably due to the fact that if black males haven't been convicted of anything by age 30, they're not likely to be convicted of anything because all criminal behavior drops off substantially from around age 30 on. They're not criminally inclined and they are unlikely to become more criminally inclined.
I'd also like to see the distribution of crimes white males are convicted of. How many are violent felonies? And for your group of more highly convicted black offenders, how many are violent felonies?
Just looking at police stats for my city alone seems to reinforce the idea that blacks have a higher rate of criminality. Predominantly black precincts have higher rates of homicide and violent crime involving firearms than any other area of the city.