It takes resources to do Science; the best thing we've got to create flows of resources is a Free Market.
That's weird, I could have swore that the USSR was the first country in space. I'm also pretty sure that what has made the U.S. such a scientific powerhouse has been tons of federal grant money that flows into our universities for basic research. The free market turns that into money afterward. There's also the issue of all those nifty advancements brought about through NASA's research.
The free market is important, but when you make it the be-all, end-all, you'll find that things don't work out as well as Ayn Rand's stories would have you believe.
Are you saying that criminals are more likely to be Democrats? Perhaps the other way around: Democrats are more likely to be criminals?
I believe that being black makes one more likely to be charged for a crime, more likely to result in a more severe sentence, and less likely to have that crime pled down to a lesser charge with a prosecutor. There's a difference between being more likely to commit a crime and more likely to be charged with a crime. And African Americans are much more likely to vote Democrat.
Marijuana prohibition originated as an excuse to imprison/deport Mexicans. It then became a convenient way of subjugating African Americans and then hippies.
This is patently false and borderline racist bullshit.
I fail to see how my complaints about systemic racism are racist.
NOT every thing is tied to "Jim Crow".
I agree. But when we're talking about the criminal justice system in the United States, the shadow of Jim Crow looms large.
Branding (literally, and figuratively) criminals goes WAY back further than 200 years, and isn't a particularly western phenomena either, as cultures around the world did it.
This is irrelevant to everything in my post.
Read a book or two outside your own worldview, and expand your insight and stop listening to the stupid professors who haven't taught you how to think.
There are a lot of assumptions in this statement. My post presented a coherent argument, whether you agree with it or not. If you wish to convince me otherwise, it would behoove you to present a coherent counter-argument rather than attack my intelligence and the integrity of academia as a whole (which is irrelevant).
The guy committed a crime. He served time, repaid his debt to society. Shouldn't he have, then, the right not to be marked as a criminal forever, in front of the world eyes?
That's the European attitude. Unfortunately, in the States, the exact opposite view is taken. People think they have a right to know who committed crimes so they can look up anyone who moves into the neighborhood, applies for a job, etc. Even if an individual gets his record expunged, the companies that do background checks don't delete/seal that record like the courts do.
In the States, the ability to brand someone as a criminal forever has its origins in Jim Crow laws. It's one of the reasons that the American South consists of large homogenous voting blocks (first it was Democrat, and since the Civil Rights Act it's been Republican). By making crime a scarlet letter, police, prosecutors, and the judiciary can target minorities and then enact voter disenfranchisement laws to keep them subjugated. This is why being "tough on crime" is a longstanding conservative agenda. It allows them to strip voting rights from their political enemies, maintain ghettos by limiting opportunities to African Americans (which maintains segregation), and provides them an excuse to maintain unequal hiring practices. This is why guys like Sessions are so adamantly against legalizing marijuana. Marijuana charges are the easiest way to get that scarlet letter on blacks and hippies.
What about Instagram? I bet most Instagram users don't even realize they're using Facebook. So 1 out of 10 Americans didn't really delete their Facebook account if they didn't also delete Instagram. Also, while I understand this is anecdotal, my teenage niece has informed me that Facebook is for old people and her classmates only use Instagram. With all the facial/location recognition software, Instagram may be more invasive than regular Facebook. They were smart to never put their logo on it because most people don't bother to learn about the services they use.
This is a very good point. Unlocking a phone that has already been confiscated just helps with a prosecution. Real time snooping allows them to easily catch people in the act of committing crimes. And that's really how law enforcement sees things. It doesn't occur to them (or they don't care) that politicians could then use the backdoors to quash dissent, target political opponents, and manipulate the citizenry. The general opinion in law enforcement seems to be that those aren't real concerns, and the only reason one could have for privacy is to commit crimes.
If you're curious, it's Stephen Jay Gould. I believe it's from the book Full House, but it's been my sig for so long I don't really remember. I would have attributed it to him in the sig but that didn't fit. He was agnostic, and culturally Jewish, so "soul" in this case refers to his sentiments, not some ethereal part of man.
I like the quote because I consider myself to be politically aligned with several "liberal" causes, but for rational reasons rather than the emotional ones. My ultra-liberal west coast friends/relatives who rail against climate change deniers and then swear by homeopathy and crystals drive me crazy. I consider them to be "convenient rationalists." Of course, most people are only rational when doing so doesn't conflict with their worldview.
I'm not concerned that the record everything I say currently, but I am concerned that they may do so in the future. It will probably start with making different words "wake words," such as things the government might be interested in.
I avoided smart phones as long as I could because I try to avoid problematic technologies. And even though my iPhone is encrypted and Apple says the right things about privacy, it still makes me uncomfortable. It's gotten to the point where mentioning dystopias such as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 has become redundant and cliche, but the reason those comparisons are so often made when we discuss these technologies is because they are glaringly relevant. We were warned about the consequences of underestimating the effects of these technologies so long ago that, despite the clear validity of the warnings, they're brushed aside as trite.
I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but we need to be careful about the technologies we adopt. We need legislation that will protect our privacy, but until that happens, we have to vote with our wallets.
It's kind of like that terrible movie about Google, The Circle, where the company's downfall is when the transparency applies to them. It's too bad the movie sucked so bad (it completely lacked nuance), as it had a good point.
I share your criticism of Facebook employees, but at what point do they cry about being special and unique, warranting a "snowflake" insult? Your pejorative loses meaning when you don't even attempt to use it in context.
That's an interesting point, but I don't think this is the right case to set a precedent for that. I haven't played this particular GTA game, but what I remember from the ones I did play, is that pretty much everything was a parody of something. Like, "Vice City" was a parody for Miami, the radio shows were parodies, etc.
The idea of using CGI to animate a famous actor without paying themwell, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before we go down that rabbit hole. But it's an audacious move, so I doubt a major movie or video game studio would attempt it. It will probably be a problem in pornography and will make its way to the courts that way.
That's true of some artistic renderings, like a painting hung in a gallery, but art that appears in commercial products aren't granted as much leeway, particularly under California law.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think California law matters. Parody is protected as a 1-A issue, and court precedent backs that up.
I don't know why it matters whether the NPC resembles her or not. They could have made it look even more like her and it wouldn't be a case. The protections for parody are very broad, especially when directed at public figures.
"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010
Jobs also didn't have any problem contradicting himself. If I remember correctly, he disparaged the whole idea of a tablet in the years leading up to the iPad's release. For years he was hypercritical of two-button mice, even though Mac OS supported right-click functions and eventually Apple released their own version of a two-button mouse. x86 was supposedly the antiquated, no-good cheap option until it wasn't.
I think the opinions of Steve Jobs were always relative to the exact time he expressed them. His opinion one day had no bearing on his opinion the next day. Touch screen technology has changed quite a bit since he made that statement, making the utility of a stylus today much different than it was in 2010.
Also, Jobs's opinions depended on what products Apple had on the market that day.
This is probably the most important point. By agreeing to one EULA, you agree to any arbitrary changes that can be made at any time. That shouldn't be legal, but as a country we've been reluctant to regulate what can and cannot be included in a contract. As you point out, one shouldn't need a law degree to understand the contractual agreement for a basic piece of software.
I think that there should be legislation that limits what can be in an EULA, as well as preventing any sort of language that refers to the software purchase as a lease in the EULA when not expressly stated at the time of purchase. The App Store (or wherever the software is bought) ought to say "lease for $xx" if you don't actually own the software. If it says "buy for $xx" or just the price, it's implicit that the purchaser will own it outright, not that they will lease it. It's sad because there's so much good that could be achieved through legislation, yet those who have the power to enact it only use it for nefarious means.
You're just old. It's common for things to feel fresh and exciting when you're young and then you feel cynical and apathetic when you're old. Young nerds are always excited about the new stuff. Old nerds tend to shrug off the new stuff because they were there to see what preceded it. I mean, you can feel like a trail blazer because of the computer work you did in the 80s, but that's no different than how my dad boasted about being a trailblazer for the computer work he did in the 70s. You can keep going back until you get to the nerd that invented the abacus.
But the limit should be how much data your phone can process, not how much data AT&T can deliver. That's what "unlimited data" means to the customers they're advertising to. AT&T knows that's what their customers think they're getting when they advertise "unlimited data," so it's incumbent upon them to deliver what they're advertising.
There no difference between pedantry and fraud when the point of the pedantry is to deceive.
I think it depends. If the bug population was only so big because they were feeding off of our agriculture, it's probably not bad. Agriculture creates its own little ecosystem. If you spend much time around corn and soybean fields, you'll notice an inordinate amount of mice and feral cats. The fields present a habitat where the mice thrive and the mice present a habitat where cats and owls thrive. The fields and their homogenous makeup that extends for thousands of acres reduces biodiversity and causes the populations that can make a niche out of the field to explode.
I'm sure it's the same with bugs: many bugs with interesting ecological niches are pushed out by the mere presence of agriculture while certain species thrive in abundance. I would guess that by limiting the population of bugs that thrive in the agricultural environment, one isn't necessarily driving other species of bugs to extinction or even killing the agricultural leeches at unacceptable levels.
If we didn't have methods to protect crops from pests, pest populations would eventually overwhelm farmers, like the locusts that would occasionally ravage the early Egyptian farmers. I like the GMO idea because it will target bugs that prey on agriculture, while leaving other niches alone. Of course, there are always unintended consequences, but I find GMOs preferable to traditional spraying and the runoff problems. Treating GMOs like a boogyman is a great fad for "organic" farmers who are just farmers that use "certified organic" pesticides rather than more modern pesticides. Personally, I think it's sad that GMOs have received such a poor reputation because of pseudo-scientific FUD.
I agree that access for guns increases school shootings, but I still think restricting gun access addresses a symptom, not the root problem. Even if these kids didn't have access to guns, we don't want to send them to a school system that causes them to hate their fellow peers and teachers so much that they would suicidally attack it given the opportunity.
It's similar to the abortion debate: making abortion illegal doesn't address the problem of unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies, especially those that end in abortion, are most common among the poorly educated. Yet people who oppose abortion think the solution is to make abortion illegal (which is stupid, because anyone can Google ways to induce a miscarriage) and these same people oppose meaningful investments in education.
These problems are the major drawbacks of our archaic government that encourages politicians to harp on hot-button issues and never concern themselves with nuance. We always want easy solutions that don't actually address underlying problems: make guns illegal, arm teachers, ban abortions, etc. The underlying problem is that our education system sucks. It's psychologically toxic and only benefits those who are born into privilege.
These types of studies do little to actually tell us anything. Behavior is a very difficult thing to study. So difficult, I would argue, that the vast majority of psychological studies cannot be taken seriously. What would be more interesting is to see how video games affect neurology. I'm willing to bet that neurologically there are many similarities between heavy video game players and gambling addicts.
When it comes to violence and trying to prevent it, I think we should be asking cultural questions rather than psychological ones. We call these mass shooters "disturbed" and assume their crimes are proof of psychological disease, but this probably isn't true. How many of these shooters have disorders that can be traced back to the neurological level, such as the various diseases we call "schizophrenia?" When it comes to depression, there's always a chicken and egg problem. Is the depression the cause of the neurological symptoms or is a neurological imbalance the cause of the depression. The answer isn't the same for all people.
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of mass shooters are technically sane (both in the clinical and legal sense). The fact that these shootings occur disproportionately in the United States seems to confirm that culture, not psychology or video games, is the main culprit. It's not possible to make wholesale cultural changes, but it is possible to restructure schools. Our schools, with the K-12 structure, shuffles kids along and organizes them by age rather than ability. Schools are primarily a social structure where we allow the kids to create their own social hierarchies and cliques and we need to radically restructure schools. We bitch and moan about bullying and shootings, but we never address that it's the archaic school systems that most likely drive the very problems that plague them.
Other countries have video games and don't have mass shootings. What they don't have is a school system that was designed over a hundred years ago and has never really changed. Our schools are culturally toxic and need to be radically modified.
I'm sorry if little Suzy doesn't want to code, but we need her to help keep down programmer salaries.
What's more disgusting is that they pretend to be feminist heroes for trying to steer all these young girls into STEM even if they don't want to. They try to scare parents, insisting that those are the only jobs of the future and little Suzy will be left behind if she pursues her liberal arts dreams. I don't think women should be discouraged from programming, but I also don't believe they should do it if they're not really passionate about it. If you don't find math fun and interesting, programming isn't for you. It's time consuming and difficult, and it's a waste of time to cram it into every student's curriculum when only a fraction of them will actually use it.
Ideally, elementary schools should teach deductive and inductive logic. Those skills translate into everything: math, programming, argumentative writing, scientific inquiry, etc.
If only minorities were getting hired, then there would probably be a lot more minorities in the tech sector.
The real problem is that tech companies want to pay programmers blue collar wages. This is why their push for minorities to learn programming is no more than an attempt to saturate the market with skilled programmers to depress wages. H1B workers are another method to do this.
I'm telling my kids to stay the hell away from programming unless they couple it with some other specialty, like biology. Programming by itself just isn't special anymore. If you want to do something worthwhile (both financially and personally) with it, you have to be able to pair it with another discipline. No one's going to pay someone a lot to develop a silly iPhone game or create a simple retail POS.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes resources to do Science; the best thing we've got to create flows of resources is a Free Market.
That's weird, I could have swore that the USSR was the first country in space. I'm also pretty sure that what has made the U.S. such a scientific powerhouse has been tons of federal grant money that flows into our universities for basic research. The free market turns that into money afterward. There's also the issue of all those nifty advancements brought about through NASA's research.
The free market is important, but when you make it the be-all, end-all, you'll find that things don't work out as well as Ayn Rand's stories would have you believe.
Are you saying that criminals are more likely to be Democrats? Perhaps the other way around: Democrats are more likely to be criminals?
I believe that being black makes one more likely to be charged for a crime, more likely to result in a more severe sentence, and less likely to have that crime pled down to a lesser charge with a prosecutor. There's a difference between being more likely to commit a crime and more likely to be charged with a crime. And African Americans are much more likely to vote Democrat.
Marijuana prohibition originated as an excuse to imprison/deport Mexicans. It then became a convenient way of subjugating African Americans and then hippies.
This is patently false and borderline racist bullshit.
I fail to see how my complaints about systemic racism are racist.
NOT every thing is tied to "Jim Crow".
I agree. But when we're talking about the criminal justice system in the United States, the shadow of Jim Crow looms large.
Branding (literally, and figuratively) criminals goes WAY back further than 200 years, and isn't a particularly western phenomena either, as cultures around the world did it.
This is irrelevant to everything in my post.
Read a book or two outside your own worldview, and expand your insight and stop listening to the stupid professors who haven't taught you how to think.
There are a lot of assumptions in this statement. My post presented a coherent argument, whether you agree with it or not. If you wish to convince me otherwise, it would behoove you to present a coherent counter-argument rather than attack my intelligence and the integrity of academia as a whole (which is irrelevant).
The guy committed a crime. He served time, repaid his debt to society. Shouldn't he have, then, the right not to be marked as a criminal forever, in front of the world eyes?
That's the European attitude. Unfortunately, in the States, the exact opposite view is taken. People think they have a right to know who committed crimes so they can look up anyone who moves into the neighborhood, applies for a job, etc. Even if an individual gets his record expunged, the companies that do background checks don't delete/seal that record like the courts do.
In the States, the ability to brand someone as a criminal forever has its origins in Jim Crow laws. It's one of the reasons that the American South consists of large homogenous voting blocks (first it was Democrat, and since the Civil Rights Act it's been Republican). By making crime a scarlet letter, police, prosecutors, and the judiciary can target minorities and then enact voter disenfranchisement laws to keep them subjugated. This is why being "tough on crime" is a longstanding conservative agenda. It allows them to strip voting rights from their political enemies, maintain ghettos by limiting opportunities to African Americans (which maintains segregation), and provides them an excuse to maintain unequal hiring practices. This is why guys like Sessions are so adamantly against legalizing marijuana. Marijuana charges are the easiest way to get that scarlet letter on blacks and hippies.
What about Instagram? I bet most Instagram users don't even realize they're using Facebook. So 1 out of 10 Americans didn't really delete their Facebook account if they didn't also delete Instagram. Also, while I understand this is anecdotal, my teenage niece has informed me that Facebook is for old people and her classmates only use Instagram. With all the facial/location recognition software, Instagram may be more invasive than regular Facebook. They were smart to never put their logo on it because most people don't bother to learn about the services they use.
This is a very good point. Unlocking a phone that has already been confiscated just helps with a prosecution. Real time snooping allows them to easily catch people in the act of committing crimes. And that's really how law enforcement sees things. It doesn't occur to them (or they don't care) that politicians could then use the backdoors to quash dissent, target political opponents, and manipulate the citizenry. The general opinion in law enforcement seems to be that those aren't real concerns, and the only reason one could have for privacy is to commit crimes.
If you're curious, it's Stephen Jay Gould. I believe it's from the book Full House, but it's been my sig for so long I don't really remember. I would have attributed it to him in the sig but that didn't fit. He was agnostic, and culturally Jewish, so "soul" in this case refers to his sentiments, not some ethereal part of man.
I like the quote because I consider myself to be politically aligned with several "liberal" causes, but for rational reasons rather than the emotional ones. My ultra-liberal west coast friends/relatives who rail against climate change deniers and then swear by homeopathy and crystals drive me crazy. I consider them to be "convenient rationalists." Of course, most people are only rational when doing so doesn't conflict with their worldview.
I'm not concerned that the record everything I say currently, but I am concerned that they may do so in the future. It will probably start with making different words "wake words," such as things the government might be interested in.
I avoided smart phones as long as I could because I try to avoid problematic technologies. And even though my iPhone is encrypted and Apple says the right things about privacy, it still makes me uncomfortable. It's gotten to the point where mentioning dystopias such as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 has become redundant and cliche, but the reason those comparisons are so often made when we discuss these technologies is because they are glaringly relevant. We were warned about the consequences of underestimating the effects of these technologies so long ago that, despite the clear validity of the warnings, they're brushed aside as trite.
I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but we need to be careful about the technologies we adopt. We need legislation that will protect our privacy, but until that happens, we have to vote with our wallets.
It's kind of like that terrible movie about Google, The Circle, where the company's downfall is when the transparency applies to them. It's too bad the movie sucked so bad (it completely lacked nuance), as it had a good point.
Grow up, snowflakes.
I share your criticism of Facebook employees, but at what point do they cry about being special and unique, warranting a "snowflake" insult? Your pejorative loses meaning when you don't even attempt to use it in context.
That's an interesting point, but I don't think this is the right case to set a precedent for that. I haven't played this particular GTA game, but what I remember from the ones I did play, is that pretty much everything was a parody of something. Like, "Vice City" was a parody for Miami, the radio shows were parodies, etc.
The idea of using CGI to animate a famous actor without paying themwell, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before we go down that rabbit hole. But it's an audacious move, so I doubt a major movie or video game studio would attempt it. It will probably be a problem in pornography and will make its way to the courts that way.
That's true of some artistic renderings, like a painting hung in a gallery, but art that appears in commercial products aren't granted as much leeway, particularly under California law.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think California law matters. Parody is protected as a 1-A issue, and court precedent backs that up.
I don't know why it matters whether the NPC resembles her or not. They could have made it look even more like her and it wouldn't be a case. The protections for parody are very broad, especially when directed at public figures.
Schools should not invest in an eco system with a single vendor for both hardware and software while there are more open alternatives.
You mean like Microsoft + Intel? In principle I agree with you but good luck getting a practical setup without a substantial amount of vendor lock in.
It's possible, but it would require federal $$$ to make it happen.
"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010
Jobs also didn't have any problem contradicting himself. If I remember correctly, he disparaged the whole idea of a tablet in the years leading up to the iPad's release. For years he was hypercritical of two-button mice, even though Mac OS supported right-click functions and eventually Apple released their own version of a two-button mouse. x86 was supposedly the antiquated, no-good cheap option until it wasn't.
I think the opinions of Steve Jobs were always relative to the exact time he expressed them. His opinion one day had no bearing on his opinion the next day. Touch screen technology has changed quite a bit since he made that statement, making the utility of a stylus today much different than it was in 2010.
Also, Jobs's opinions depended on what products Apple had on the market that day.
The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.
How about you get with the times and give that to everyone, Apple?
The upgrade is fairly cheap.
4) Changes almost monthly
This is probably the most important point. By agreeing to one EULA, you agree to any arbitrary changes that can be made at any time. That shouldn't be legal, but as a country we've been reluctant to regulate what can and cannot be included in a contract. As you point out, one shouldn't need a law degree to understand the contractual agreement for a basic piece of software.
I think that there should be legislation that limits what can be in an EULA, as well as preventing any sort of language that refers to the software purchase as a lease in the EULA when not expressly stated at the time of purchase. The App Store (or wherever the software is bought) ought to say "lease for $xx" if you don't actually own the software. If it says "buy for $xx" or just the price, it's implicit that the purchaser will own it outright, not that they will lease it. It's sad because there's so much good that could be achieved through legislation, yet those who have the power to enact it only use it for nefarious means.
You're just old. It's common for things to feel fresh and exciting when you're young and then you feel cynical and apathetic when you're old. Young nerds are always excited about the new stuff. Old nerds tend to shrug off the new stuff because they were there to see what preceded it. I mean, you can feel like a trail blazer because of the computer work you did in the 80s, but that's no different than how my dad boasted about being a trailblazer for the computer work he did in the 70s. You can keep going back until you get to the nerd that invented the abacus.
But the limit should be how much data your phone can process, not how much data AT&T can deliver. That's what "unlimited data" means to the customers they're advertising to. AT&T knows that's what their customers think they're getting when they advertise "unlimited data," so it's incumbent upon them to deliver what they're advertising.
There no difference between pedantry and fraud when the point of the pedantry is to deceive.
lamo whistleblew on a whistleblower
That's not whistleblowing, it's acting as an informant.
I think it depends. If the bug population was only so big because they were feeding off of our agriculture, it's probably not bad. Agriculture creates its own little ecosystem. If you spend much time around corn and soybean fields, you'll notice an inordinate amount of mice and feral cats. The fields present a habitat where the mice thrive and the mice present a habitat where cats and owls thrive. The fields and their homogenous makeup that extends for thousands of acres reduces biodiversity and causes the populations that can make a niche out of the field to explode.
I'm sure it's the same with bugs: many bugs with interesting ecological niches are pushed out by the mere presence of agriculture while certain species thrive in abundance. I would guess that by limiting the population of bugs that thrive in the agricultural environment, one isn't necessarily driving other species of bugs to extinction or even killing the agricultural leeches at unacceptable levels.
If we didn't have methods to protect crops from pests, pest populations would eventually overwhelm farmers, like the locusts that would occasionally ravage the early Egyptian farmers. I like the GMO idea because it will target bugs that prey on agriculture, while leaving other niches alone. Of course, there are always unintended consequences, but I find GMOs preferable to traditional spraying and the runoff problems. Treating GMOs like a boogyman is a great fad for "organic" farmers who are just farmers that use "certified organic" pesticides rather than more modern pesticides. Personally, I think it's sad that GMOs have received such a poor reputation because of pseudo-scientific FUD.
I agree that access for guns increases school shootings, but I still think restricting gun access addresses a symptom, not the root problem. Even if these kids didn't have access to guns, we don't want to send them to a school system that causes them to hate their fellow peers and teachers so much that they would suicidally attack it given the opportunity.
It's similar to the abortion debate: making abortion illegal doesn't address the problem of unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies, especially those that end in abortion, are most common among the poorly educated. Yet people who oppose abortion think the solution is to make abortion illegal (which is stupid, because anyone can Google ways to induce a miscarriage) and these same people oppose meaningful investments in education.
These problems are the major drawbacks of our archaic government that encourages politicians to harp on hot-button issues and never concern themselves with nuance. We always want easy solutions that don't actually address underlying problems: make guns illegal, arm teachers, ban abortions, etc. The underlying problem is that our education system sucks. It's psychologically toxic and only benefits those who are born into privilege.
These types of studies do little to actually tell us anything. Behavior is a very difficult thing to study. So difficult, I would argue, that the vast majority of psychological studies cannot be taken seriously. What would be more interesting is to see how video games affect neurology. I'm willing to bet that neurologically there are many similarities between heavy video game players and gambling addicts.
When it comes to violence and trying to prevent it, I think we should be asking cultural questions rather than psychological ones. We call these mass shooters "disturbed" and assume their crimes are proof of psychological disease, but this probably isn't true. How many of these shooters have disorders that can be traced back to the neurological level, such as the various diseases we call "schizophrenia?" When it comes to depression, there's always a chicken and egg problem. Is the depression the cause of the neurological symptoms or is a neurological imbalance the cause of the depression. The answer isn't the same for all people.
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of mass shooters are technically sane (both in the clinical and legal sense). The fact that these shootings occur disproportionately in the United States seems to confirm that culture, not psychology or video games, is the main culprit. It's not possible to make wholesale cultural changes, but it is possible to restructure schools. Our schools, with the K-12 structure, shuffles kids along and organizes them by age rather than ability. Schools are primarily a social structure where we allow the kids to create their own social hierarchies and cliques and we need to radically restructure schools. We bitch and moan about bullying and shootings, but we never address that it's the archaic school systems that most likely drive the very problems that plague them.
Other countries have video games and don't have mass shootings. What they don't have is a school system that was designed over a hundred years ago and has never really changed. Our schools are culturally toxic and need to be radically modified.
I'm sorry if little Suzy doesn't want to code, but we need her to help keep down programmer salaries.
What's more disgusting is that they pretend to be feminist heroes for trying to steer all these young girls into STEM even if they don't want to. They try to scare parents, insisting that those are the only jobs of the future and little Suzy will be left behind if she pursues her liberal arts dreams. I don't think women should be discouraged from programming, but I also don't believe they should do it if they're not really passionate about it. If you don't find math fun and interesting, programming isn't for you. It's time consuming and difficult, and it's a waste of time to cram it into every student's curriculum when only a fraction of them will actually use it.
Ideally, elementary schools should teach deductive and inductive logic. Those skills translate into everything: math, programming, argumentative writing, scientific inquiry, etc.
If only minorities were getting hired, then there would probably be a lot more minorities in the tech sector.
The real problem is that tech companies want to pay programmers blue collar wages. This is why their push for minorities to learn programming is no more than an attempt to saturate the market with skilled programmers to depress wages. H1B workers are another method to do this.
I'm telling my kids to stay the hell away from programming unless they couple it with some other specialty, like biology. Programming by itself just isn't special anymore. If you want to do something worthwhile (both financially and personally) with it, you have to be able to pair it with another discipline. No one's going to pay someone a lot to develop a silly iPhone game or create a simple retail POS.