before people start with the whataboutism and Republicans
Your preemptive defense isn't very creative. If you want to preemptively defend your ideas, it would be best to defend them against plausible complaints rather than implausible ones. The problem with your argument is that it assumes that, because this bill is sponsored by two Democrats, that this is somehow part of the greater Democratic platform. It is not. Because this bill is divorced from the general Democratic platform, your attempt to couple it with the ideals of the Democratic party seems pretty weak.
Not that any of the above matters. You undermined your argument from the beginning with the whole oversimplification of the second amendment and the quaint idea that guns can protect you from tyranny.
It's more a question of economic viability. The better question is: In a world where practically everything that serves humans' base needs can be automated, will we continue to cling to capitalism and attempt to maintain our social hierarchical structure?
The danger of automation isn't that it will necessarily destroy society. The danger is humans maintaining a form of distributive justice that is incompatible with automation.
While the general trend of automation has been to make life easier for people, it hasn't always been easy. The reason luddites came about in the first place was that industrialization led to dangerous and degrading employment that benefitted those who owned the means of production at the expense of those who worked in the factories. For over a century industrialization benefitted the few at the expense of the many. While we may look back and think it's worth it because of how it all worked out for our benefit, if we become the ones stuck in such a rut then it won't seem so rosy.
Furthermore, there are other factors that need to be considered. Everyone loves to praise the inefficiency of the U.S. government as a feature to prevent rash changes, but automation presents unique problems that will require our government to change in ways that may be barred by the Constitution. For instance, education is left to the states and this cannot be changed without a Constitutional amendment. Without blue-collar jobs or a massive implementation of welfare, automation will most definitely leave many destitute. And AI will only complicate matters further. So many of these STEM jobs that are currently being touted will be compromised by AI. Computer programming is an area that will probably soon become too complex for humans to do (how many here honestly think they could tinker with Google's code?).
The problem isn't just that automation will take jobs away. The problem is that the challenges of automation will force us to rethink distributive justice in ways that most people are unprepared to do. Automation will be inherently incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, which is a sacred cow to roughly 50% of the voters in the U.S. Bill Joy warned us almost twenty years ago.
And my obvious point was that the demonization of hookup culture is what has led to the younger generations being a bunch of sexual prudes who have biological urges that are unhealthily being restricted.
It's not a report. It's an article. A "reporter" may write the article, but unless it's a specially commissioned document and not one of many articles in a periodical publication, it isn't a "report."
Pedantry at its finest. In the colloquial sense, their use of the word "report" is fine.
OED:
a spoken or written description of an event or situation, especially one intended for publication or broadcasting in the media:
which means they'll notch up a lot more victims than they would be able to in a more traditional society
Is that the one where women are subservient to their husbands? Did you know that Amish communities have huge problems with incestuous rape? Kind of like the whole Josh Duggar thing. When you try to sublimate sexual energy it gets misdirected. The traditional ideal of no sex before marriage didn't protect women from cads—it made them afraid to speak up when they were raped because part of that "traditional ideal" is that a non-virgin women is tainted. Guys like Weinstein aren't notching up more victims, their crimes are simply being exposed. Furthermore, one only has to point to Mississippi to see that a culture of abstinence before marriage leads to tons of teen pregnancies and premature marriages.
Your defense of chivalry is equally appalling. Harvey Weinstein didn't rape a bunch of women because no one taught him some chivalric code growing up. A chivalrous society wouldn't have meant that some knight in shining armor would have stopped him from committing his crimes.
While I agree that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction—as illustrated by things like the Aziz Ansari case and tenuous Title IX cases brought about on college campuses—I think you misdiagnose the cause and your proposed solution would just be more problematic. It's a complicated issue, and antithetical to your point, part of the problem probably is that young people take sex too seriously and don't have enough of it.
It's like 1984, except people actually pay for the pleasure of having Big Brother in their home. If the NSA hasn't infiltrated these devices, it's only a matter of time. Even if the NSA couldn't get to these things, it's evil enough that these companies are working to have profiles on huge swaths of the population so they can monetize it in whatever way possible.
It's crazy that there are people on here defending these things. If the/. community isn't sufficiently paranoid, then society really is doomed to complacency.
It's nice to hear that you carefully went over all the evidence.
1) They were specifically referring to the Russians who were being indicted. The Americans those Russians contacted were not aware they were speaking to Russians. That doesn't mean that someone like Carter Page or Paul Manafort weren't in contact with other Russians (if they were, they would probably be higher on the food chain).
2) The rallies were to sow discord after the election. That doesn't imply that they didn't get the man they wanted in the Oval Office. It's pretty obvious the Russians wanted Trump to win, whether he or his campaign colluded with them or not. They wanted what was the worst for American.
Another great example is Wayne National Forest in Ohio. Southeastern Ohio was completely destroyed by coal mining in the early twentieth century, and when the coal ran out the economy was left just as devastated as the land. FDR made the land a national forest as one of his New Deal plans, and bought the land off any residents who would sell, and hired those who stayed to plant trees. Today, only eighty some years later, the place looks like it been a forest for hundreds of years (and it's been this way for several decades).
It doesn't take long for mother nature to thrive, given a chance. If the Chinese remain committed to turning their environmental situation around, they certainly could. The commitment is the problem. Unfortunately, Wayne has been leased out by the federal government for fracking. Fortunately, Wayne has shown the ability to rebound from worse.
You can't expect them to get it right 100% of the time. The program has been on for a long time and mistakes will be made. And if you look at the list of controversies on wikipedia, there's quite a bit of nuance to most of them. 60 Minutes takes risks, as does any serious investigative journalism. One of those risks is that people will come to them with hit pieces which may be difficult to sort out. For what they do and the risks they take, I'd argue they have a very good track record. It's much better than the talking heads on the 24/7 news channels who just spout polarizing opinions at one another. It's also much better than the dying medium of local news. TV news in America sucks, and it sucks by design. At least 60 Minutes tries not to suck.
This is exactly what I was going to post. They just want to replace ad blockers with an ad blocker that doesn't block their own ads and whatever other large companies they partner with.
While I agree that many of the ads they want to block are annoying, nefarious, or both; they have a clear conflict of interest in their attempt to police such action. They may be open and transparent about this whole thing now, which allows them to boast about how nice they are while applying lube, but it stands to make them to be the gatekeeper for their competitors in their multi-billion dollar industry. I can't understand how anyone would look at this and not see a glaring anti-competitive move.
I completely agree. E-mail allows the art of letter writing to proliferate despite the fact that nobody uses the USPS to write letters anymore.
As for Wave, it served a niche as a collaborative project tool, and it was great. I used it and it's really unfortunate that Apache was never able to put it back together (I don't really understand why, Google gave it to them fully functional). I think the big problem with Wave is that it only served such a small niche, and it didn't have the potential to pillage and monetize personal information the way e-mail does (while I think that's great, Google probably didn't).
I guess it should be mentioned that Microsoft has already been trying to take e-mail in this direction with Outlook on Office 360. They have notifications and the ability to add plug-ins.
I do worry a bit about Google's new platform, though. As many have mentioned, it could be used for nefarious purposes. I'm uneasy about the fact that people can "update" the e-mail they sent you. One thing I like about e-mail is that it can function like a permanent record.
What really made me raise my eyebrow is the fact that companies have to sign up with Google to send these types of e-mails. I feel like e-mail should be fairly universal, and this seems to threaten to take that away. If Google e-mail isn't compatible with Microsoft e-mail which isn't compatible with my company's personal e-mail server, the advantage of e-mail isn't just diminished, it's destroyed.
We can pretty much blame Fox for this on the "professional" side of things. Outlets like CNN used to be straight-up journalism not far removed from CSPAN, turning their nose up at Fox's brand of emotional partisan reporting. Fox made a ton of advertising money as a result, so of course everyone else had to follow in the end.
I don't think that's an accurate description. CNN started the problem of crappy TV news and Fox just exacerbated the problem. I would elaborate, but I think the best argument for my case is Anchorman 2. That's an amazing satire if I ever saw one.
Given what passes for "journalism", that might be a bit of an optimistic assessment.
I think the biggest problem with journalism is that there are actually too many choices. There's great investigative journalism out there, probably more than at any time in history, but there's also a boatload of crap. It's easy to monetize crap. It's difficult to monetize great investigative journalism. It's more expensive to produce and attracts less eyeballs. Most people who complain about the state of journalism are the same people who consume the crap. If you want to read good journalism, all you have to do is a little bit of googling. Or just listen to NPR.
I certainly agree. We tend to think of ethics as a class for philosophy majors, but it should be studied by everyone. While many curricula require an ethics class tailored for them, such as medical ethics or business ethics, these classes can be problematic. Medical ethics tends to focus on the entirely bogus âoeethics of careâ while business ethics tends to devolve into ethical egoism.
As for the hard sciences, I think an ethics class focused on the Kurt Vonnegut nove Cats Cradle would be ideal.
Thatâ(TM)s because most people are insulated from idiots. I would have a hard time believing people fell for that crap, too, except I live in the Midwest and I saw it first hand.
The real kicker was when a coworker insisted I watch this Fox News story accusing Hilary Clinton of murder. It was not just the fact that Russia threw fake stories up on Facebook. The problem was they conservative news outlets ran with them, citing each other in ways that made them sound authoritative.
Of course, as soon as this was exposed Trump refashioned the phrase âoefake newsâ to refer to news that was critical to him. I would say itâ(TM)s pretty audacious for him to steal a line directly out of Oceaniaâ(TM)s playbook, but I am sure Trump never read Orwell.
That bridge is literally the example in the article Jodka cited.
So "crumbling infrastructure" peddlers play on this concern by habitually agonizing over things like the impending outbreak of tragic bridge collapses that will kill thousands. They bring up tragedies like the 2007 disaster with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis even though, according to federal investigators, the collapse was due to a design flaw rather than decaying infrastructure. Many outlets and politicians simply ignore the inconvenient fact that the rare fatality involving infrastructure typically has nothing to do with "crumbling" and everything to do with natural elements or human error.
Well, I'm sure someone will point to a bridge or two that is in need of repair, or provide some anecdotal evidence regarding the potholes they must suffer through on their morning commute. It's part of the idiocracy that's formed: outliers become evidence for broad trends. Just look at all the FUD surrounding terrorism. Even though terrorist attacks are very rare, it's the one thing people are afraid of and want protection from. If people wanted protection from real life dangers they would demand more trains, as cars are so deadly. Of course, the rebuttal to that would be the two outlier train crashes that recently happened.
Hackers Manage to Run Linux on X is probably to most common beginning to a/. headline. As long as new devices are manufactured, nerds will make them run Linux. Imagine if all these countless man hours were spent making Linux work on PCs.
How about someone creating a new social network and... shocker.. does not sell out?
I gotta admit, if I created a company and some big player offered me a billion dollars for it, I don't think I could turn it down. You'd have to extremely passionate and confident about your company to turn down life-changing money. Not to mention that a non-evil social network would be extremely difficult to make profitable.
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
I think what made them really disappear was Alan Greenspan crying in front of Congress, admitting that the economic theories he based our fiscal policy on for decades were based on flawed premises. When guys like Paul Ryan try to argue for supply side economics, knowing full well that the only true test for economic theories—history—has proven the theory to be everything its critics have accused it of, it's almost more infuriating to hear them pretend to be rational.
Something had to replace the intellectual libertarians who lean on their highly theoretical ideas about how to optimize the economy. Hopefully populism, jingoism, and a complete disregard for rationality are just stop-gap measures while the GOP rediscovers itself. Unfortunately, the GOP has long been the party of convincing the ignorant to vote against their own interests. The "supply side" rationality of Reagan and his ilk and the xenophobic rancor of Trump and his cronies are just different methods for convincing those who know nothing about economics to vote for those who seek political power as a means for reinforcing their economic power.
Slashdot Mirror
before people start with the whataboutism and Republicans
Your preemptive defense isn't very creative. If you want to preemptively defend your ideas, it would be best to defend them against plausible complaints rather than implausible ones. The problem with your argument is that it assumes that, because this bill is sponsored by two Democrats, that this is somehow part of the greater Democratic platform. It is not. Because this bill is divorced from the general Democratic platform, your attempt to couple it with the ideals of the Democratic party seems pretty weak.
Not that any of the above matters. You undermined your argument from the beginning with the whole oversimplification of the second amendment and the quaint idea that guns can protect you from tyranny.
It's more a question of economic viability. The better question is: In a world where practically everything that serves humans' base needs can be automated, will we continue to cling to capitalism and attempt to maintain our social hierarchical structure?
The danger of automation isn't that it will necessarily destroy society. The danger is humans maintaining a form of distributive justice that is incompatible with automation.
While the general trend of automation has been to make life easier for people, it hasn't always been easy. The reason luddites came about in the first place was that industrialization led to dangerous and degrading employment that benefitted those who owned the means of production at the expense of those who worked in the factories. For over a century industrialization benefitted the few at the expense of the many. While we may look back and think it's worth it because of how it all worked out for our benefit, if we become the ones stuck in such a rut then it won't seem so rosy.
Furthermore, there are other factors that need to be considered. Everyone loves to praise the inefficiency of the U.S. government as a feature to prevent rash changes, but automation presents unique problems that will require our government to change in ways that may be barred by the Constitution. For instance, education is left to the states and this cannot be changed without a Constitutional amendment. Without blue-collar jobs or a massive implementation of welfare, automation will most definitely leave many destitute. And AI will only complicate matters further. So many of these STEM jobs that are currently being touted will be compromised by AI. Computer programming is an area that will probably soon become too complex for humans to do (how many here honestly think they could tinker with Google's code?).
The problem isn't just that automation will take jobs away. The problem is that the challenges of automation will force us to rethink distributive justice in ways that most people are unprepared to do. Automation will be inherently incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, which is a sacred cow to roughly 50% of the voters in the U.S. Bill Joy warned us almost twenty years ago.
And my obvious point was that the demonization of hookup culture is what has led to the younger generations being a bunch of sexual prudes who have biological urges that are unhealthily being restricted.
It's not a report. It's an article. A "reporter" may write the article, but unless it's a specially commissioned document and not one of many articles in a periodical publication, it isn't a "report."
Pedantry at its finest. In the colloquial sense, their use of the word "report" is fine.
OED:
a spoken or written description of an event or situation, especially one intended for publication or broadcasting in the media:
QED
which means they'll notch up a lot more victims than they would be able to in a more traditional society
Is that the one where women are subservient to their husbands? Did you know that Amish communities have huge problems with incestuous rape? Kind of like the whole Josh Duggar thing. When you try to sublimate sexual energy it gets misdirected. The traditional ideal of no sex before marriage didn't protect women from cads—it made them afraid to speak up when they were raped because part of that "traditional ideal" is that a non-virgin women is tainted. Guys like Weinstein aren't notching up more victims, their crimes are simply being exposed. Furthermore, one only has to point to Mississippi to see that a culture of abstinence before marriage leads to tons of teen pregnancies and premature marriages.
Your defense of chivalry is equally appalling. Harvey Weinstein didn't rape a bunch of women because no one taught him some chivalric code growing up. A chivalrous society wouldn't have meant that some knight in shining armor would have stopped him from committing his crimes.
While I agree that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction—as illustrated by things like the Aziz Ansari case and tenuous Title IX cases brought about on college campuses—I think you misdiagnose the cause and your proposed solution would just be more problematic. It's a complicated issue, and antithetical to your point, part of the problem probably is that young people take sex too seriously and don't have enough of it.
What are they going to find? That I talk to my cats?
This is the type of attitude that undermines privacy for those who actually need/want it.
It's like 1984, except people actually pay for the pleasure of having Big Brother in their home. If the NSA hasn't infiltrated these devices, it's only a matter of time. Even if the NSA couldn't get to these things, it's evil enough that these companies are working to have profiles on huge swaths of the population so they can monetize it in whatever way possible.
It's crazy that there are people on here defending these things. If the /. community isn't sufficiently paranoid, then society really is doomed to complacency.
It's nice to hear that you carefully went over all the evidence.
1) They were specifically referring to the Russians who were being indicted. The Americans those Russians contacted were not aware they were speaking to Russians. That doesn't mean that someone like Carter Page or Paul Manafort weren't in contact with other Russians (if they were, they would probably be higher on the food chain).
2) The rallies were to sow discord after the election. That doesn't imply that they didn't get the man they wanted in the Oval Office. It's pretty obvious the Russians wanted Trump to win, whether he or his campaign colluded with them or not. They wanted what was the worst for American.
It's weird how all the AC flame bait comments like this one were so quickly upvoted. . .
The problem is that Microsoft will just convince the AG that they own Linux and it will end in the same result.
Another great example is Wayne National Forest in Ohio. Southeastern Ohio was completely destroyed by coal mining in the early twentieth century, and when the coal ran out the economy was left just as devastated as the land. FDR made the land a national forest as one of his New Deal plans, and bought the land off any residents who would sell, and hired those who stayed to plant trees. Today, only eighty some years later, the place looks like it been a forest for hundreds of years (and it's been this way for several decades).
It doesn't take long for mother nature to thrive, given a chance. If the Chinese remain committed to turning their environmental situation around, they certainly could. The commitment is the problem. Unfortunately, Wayne has been leased out by the federal government for fracking. Fortunately, Wayne has shown the ability to rebound from worse.
You can't expect them to get it right 100% of the time. The program has been on for a long time and mistakes will be made. And if you look at the list of controversies on wikipedia, there's quite a bit of nuance to most of them. 60 Minutes takes risks, as does any serious investigative journalism. One of those risks is that people will come to them with hit pieces which may be difficult to sort out. For what they do and the risks they take, I'd argue they have a very good track record. It's much better than the talking heads on the 24/7 news channels who just spout polarizing opinions at one another. It's also much better than the dying medium of local news. TV news in America sucks, and it sucks by design. At least 60 Minutes tries not to suck.
This is exactly what I was going to post. They just want to replace ad blockers with an ad blocker that doesn't block their own ads and whatever other large companies they partner with.
While I agree that many of the ads they want to block are annoying, nefarious, or both; they have a clear conflict of interest in their attempt to police such action. They may be open and transparent about this whole thing now, which allows them to boast about how nice they are while applying lube, but it stands to make them to be the gatekeeper for their competitors in their multi-billion dollar industry. I can't understand how anyone would look at this and not see a glaring anti-competitive move.
I completely agree. E-mail allows the art of letter writing to proliferate despite the fact that nobody uses the USPS to write letters anymore.
As for Wave, it served a niche as a collaborative project tool, and it was great. I used it and it's really unfortunate that Apache was never able to put it back together (I don't really understand why, Google gave it to them fully functional). I think the big problem with Wave is that it only served such a small niche, and it didn't have the potential to pillage and monetize personal information the way e-mail does (while I think that's great, Google probably didn't).
I guess it should be mentioned that Microsoft has already been trying to take e-mail in this direction with Outlook on Office 360. They have notifications and the ability to add plug-ins.
I do worry a bit about Google's new platform, though. As many have mentioned, it could be used for nefarious purposes. I'm uneasy about the fact that people can "update" the e-mail they sent you. One thing I like about e-mail is that it can function like a permanent record.
What really made me raise my eyebrow is the fact that companies have to sign up with Google to send these types of e-mails. I feel like e-mail should be fairly universal, and this seems to threaten to take that away. If Google e-mail isn't compatible with Microsoft e-mail which isn't compatible with my company's personal e-mail server, the advantage of e-mail isn't just diminished, it's destroyed.
We can pretty much blame Fox for this on the "professional" side of things. Outlets like CNN used to be straight-up journalism not far removed from CSPAN, turning their nose up at Fox's brand of emotional partisan reporting. Fox made a ton of advertising money as a result, so of course everyone else had to follow in the end.
I don't think that's an accurate description. CNN started the problem of crappy TV news and Fox just exacerbated the problem. I would elaborate, but I think the best argument for my case is Anchorman 2. That's an amazing satire if I ever saw one.
Fortunately, 60 Minutes is still on the air.
Given what passes for "journalism", that might be a bit of an optimistic assessment.
I think the biggest problem with journalism is that there are actually too many choices. There's great investigative journalism out there, probably more than at any time in history, but there's also a boatload of crap. It's easy to monetize crap. It's difficult to monetize great investigative journalism. It's more expensive to produce and attracts less eyeballs. Most people who complain about the state of journalism are the same people who consume the crap. If you want to read good journalism, all you have to do is a little bit of googling. Or just listen to NPR.
I certainly agree. We tend to think of ethics as a class for philosophy majors, but it should be studied by everyone. While many curricula require an ethics class tailored for them, such as medical ethics or business ethics, these classes can be problematic. Medical ethics tends to focus on the entirely bogus âoeethics of careâ while business ethics tends to devolve into ethical egoism.
As for the hard sciences, I think an ethics class focused on the Kurt Vonnegut nove Cats Cradle would be ideal.
Thatâ(TM)s because most people are insulated from idiots. I would have a hard time believing people fell for that crap, too, except I live in the Midwest and I saw it first hand.
The real kicker was when a coworker insisted I watch this Fox News story accusing Hilary Clinton of murder. It was not just the fact that Russia threw fake stories up on Facebook. The problem was they conservative news outlets ran with them, citing each other in ways that made them sound authoritative.
Of course, as soon as this was exposed Trump refashioned the phrase âoefake newsâ to refer to news that was critical to him. I would say itâ(TM)s pretty audacious for him to steal a line directly out of Oceaniaâ(TM)s playbook, but I am sure Trump never read Orwell.
That bridge is literally the example in the article Jodka cited.
So "crumbling infrastructure" peddlers play on this concern by habitually agonizing over things like the impending outbreak of tragic bridge collapses that will kill thousands. They bring up tragedies like the 2007 disaster with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis even though, according to federal investigators, the collapse was due to a design flaw rather than decaying infrastructure. Many outlets and politicians simply ignore the inconvenient fact that the rare fatality involving infrastructure typically has nothing to do with "crumbling" and everything to do with natural elements or human error.
Well, I'm sure someone will point to a bridge or two that is in need of repair, or provide some anecdotal evidence regarding the potholes they must suffer through on their morning commute. It's part of the idiocracy that's formed: outliers become evidence for broad trends. Just look at all the FUD surrounding terrorism. Even though terrorist attacks are very rare, it's the one thing people are afraid of and want protection from. If people wanted protection from real life dangers they would demand more trains, as cars are so deadly. Of course, the rebuttal to that would be the two outlier train crashes that recently happened.
Hackers Manage to Run Linux on X is probably to most common beginning to a /. headline. As long as new devices are manufactured, nerds will make them run Linux. Imagine if all these countless man hours were spent making Linux work on PCs.
How about someone creating a new social network and ... shocker .. does not sell out?
I gotta admit, if I created a company and some big player offered me a billion dollars for it, I don't think I could turn it down. You'd have to extremely passionate and confident about your company to turn down life-changing money. Not to mention that a non-evil social network would be extremely difficult to make profitable.
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
I think what made them really disappear was Alan Greenspan crying in front of Congress, admitting that the economic theories he based our fiscal policy on for decades were based on flawed premises. When guys like Paul Ryan try to argue for supply side economics, knowing full well that the only true test for economic theories—history—has proven the theory to be everything its critics have accused it of, it's almost more infuriating to hear them pretend to be rational.
Something had to replace the intellectual libertarians who lean on their highly theoretical ideas about how to optimize the economy. Hopefully populism, jingoism, and a complete disregard for rationality are just stop-gap measures while the GOP rediscovers itself. Unfortunately, the GOP has long been the party of convincing the ignorant to vote against their own interests. The "supply side" rationality of Reagan and his ilk and the xenophobic rancor of Trump and his cronies are just different methods for convincing those who know nothing about economics to vote for those who seek political power as a means for reinforcing their economic power.