However, you're completely discounting the advantages that you (or I) were given simply by the circumstances of our birth. Two centuries of official and unofficial repression mean that black families distinctly worse off in financial terms, and unable to provide the same advantages their children that we received. While some can overcome this, it's certainly not a level playing field if we just "left everything alone."
Now, perhaps a better approach might be to tackle this from the perspective of poverty, because there are certainly poor whites, and wealthy minority individuals, that do not fit the average. The problem with this is that because poverty in the USA tends to correlate very strongly with race, you also tend to see animosity in terms of race manifesting in opposition to any programs to benefit the poor. To be fair, that's not to say being against anti-poverty programs, government assistance, welfare, etc is ipso facto racism, merely that the two are often correlated. There are many who are not at all racist, but oppose welfare/social programs/etc because they strongly believe that poor people are poor because of their own failings, or other Calvinist sort of ideas, and while I would argue they're wrong, it's not necessarily racial. That said, keep in mind that many social programs like Social Security (originally), the WW2 GI Bill, and others, were designed to effectively exclude black people, in order to secure the backing of Southern Conservatives.
I find it extremely ironic that you rail against "Social Justice in Sci-Fi" and yet you hold up Star Trek, which has tended to be on the forefront of pushing for equality and, yes, social justice.
The Original Series had an INCREDIBLY diverse cast for a 1960s TV show. It may seem anodyne today, but it certainly wasn't then. This was so controversial that many network affiliates (primarily in the South) refused to air the episode where Captain Kirk and Uhura kissed, because at the time, an interracial kiss was simply THAT controversial.
Furthermore, Star Trek has always presented a utopian vision not just of technology, but of human (and interplanetary/alien) society. Heck, the Federation is essentially a completely socialist post-scarcity utopia where everyone gets everything they need because most resources are so abundant. I highly suggest you go back and watch it all again, and pay closer attention to that part of it, rather than just focusing on the recalibration of the deflector array and rerouting of inverted power from the warp core.
As far as the Hugo awards go... yes, demands to be inclusive can go too far, but that doesn't mean that being inclusive, or being aware of writers from previously disadvantaged groups, is a bad thing. As a society, we are nowhere near the point where everyone is on a truly level playing field.
Do you understand what happens when you end the Government's monopoly of the use of force? I don't think you really do.
I'll try to explain and illustrate. Do you know why organized criminal enterprises use force? It's generally not because they're engaged in robbery, though in cases they certainly can be. No, it's to protect their (illegal) lines of business, whether that's drugs or any number of other rackets. They are unable to rely on a neutral third party (i.e. the Government) to enforce their contracts, and so they rely on the threat of violence. If you don't pay Bank of America back, they go to the Government (Courts etc) to try and get whatever money they can from you. If you don't pay Mikey the Loan Shark back, he sends thugs to break your kneecaps. If you sell fake aspirin to CVS, you'll face civil and criminal penalties, get sued, etc. If you sell fake heroin to Mister Big, you'd best hope you arranged a nice life insurance payout for your family. Now, to a degree, some of it goes hand in hand in that those who break other laws and social conventions tend to lack moral qualms about doing so with respect to violence, but there's a large amount of amoral pragmatism in it too.
I completely fail to see how normalizing any of this is in anyone's best interest. Even simply allowing increased private use of force in a regulated manner is extremely problematic.
As far as being able to opt out, well... you can always leave. It may not be as easy as it once was, and you may say that your options are limited - but I'd also suggest that's because you want to enjoy many of the benefits of the society that you're so quick to decry.
I'd say if they don't want to be in that business line, then by all means they should sell it off. Running a regulated natural monopoly business like "being the dumb pipe" is a boring line of business, but it's also a reliable line of business. You won't make ridiculous profits in it, but you'll probably make steady (if small) profits. It's why we still have companies that run the power lines and water pipes and such. Better to have the companies that want to be in those lines of business take over.
And if significant infrastructure upgrades require investments of government/tax dollars... well, I'm perfectly okay with that too. I'd much rather have high speed fiber internet laid down in my county rather than, say, a new sports stadium.
Yes, this exactly. The golden age of the expansion of the commercial/consumer internet was when it was primarily run over the phone lines - dialup and DSL. The low barrier to entry allowed tons of new ISPs to enter the market, offering basic unlimited service for a flat rate. The incumbents at the time - AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and their ilk, were by and large ridiculously overpriced, not to mention did not offer any unlimited plans, with time-based metering. (To be fair they did offer additional services, but over time most people realized there were more/better free alternatives elsewhere on the open internet.)
Pretty soon everyone could get online, because everyone - even in rural areas - had landline phone service (not to mention electricity). Service was slow compared to today, but it was a limit of the current technology rather than any unwillingness of companies to invest or build out in a given area. Upgrades occured, up until about the point that dialup and DSL hit a wall where it was no longer feasible under current technology to increase bandwidth using the (government mandated Title II Unbundled) telephone lines.
Instead, most people were forced to switch to (proprietary bundled) cable lines to get high speed internet. Only recently have fiber lines been available for some lucky few, and most of us are still stuck at the mercy of our cable company. In the meantime, competition has all but disappeared, rates have shot up and service has become legendarily bad for many people.
So explain to me again why Title II is so horrible, because I'm really just not seeing it.
What you seem to miss is that the addition of computers and the internet does not substantially change activity or interaction, it merely removes the penalty of distance. I am not required to go walk/bike/drive over to my friend's house in order to talk to them, or play games with them. I can send letters without waiting any significant amount of time for a response. It is also not the first to do so - the telephone has long since made this possible for voice communication, albeit with certain limitations.
And I'm sure society has never seen a trend of teenagers spending all day talking on the phone with their friends./sarcasm
Now, do people get depressed and use the internet as a distraction or means to avoid the outside world? Absolutely. Can antisocial people use the internet as a buffer to put between themselves and others? Sure. Can someone waste time and avoid responsibility while doing nothing but play games? They certainly can. The internet makes some of these easier, but all of these things existed long before the internet. You still have yet to prove in any way that making contact and communication easier, and reducing the time penalty involved with each, has made some sort of transformative difference. I would be genuinely curious and interested if someone did, but until that time I'm going to remain skeptical.
Lastly, for someone who throws out accusations of impoliteness and antisocial behavior, I hate to point it out (well, no, actually I don't), but the one tossing insults at others in this thread is you.
That's not a disorder in the sense that the average person means it though. In some ways this is similar to all those stupid "X with a computer" patents, in that somehow people think that adding a computer into the equation makes it magically different. Obsessive compulsive behavior already is a disorder, and is entirely different from what people usually mean when they talk about "internet addiction." The internet, and anything associated with it, be that "excessive" gaming or Facebook or whatever, are at most a symptom of something else. There is no inherent chemical dependency involved any more than with any other activity.
If anything, this gets scapegoated by many people because it does not fit the old norms of human society. If those same youths were obsessively studying for schoolwork all day long, it would not elicit nearly the same reaction. If they spent their entire day socializing with friends in person, would anyone be surprised?
As for the definition of online versus offline, that's a somewhat tricky distinction to make. It would be safer to say that in an increasingly connected world it will be harder to find anything that is "completely offline" unless you specifically seek it out - but, again, it's not like there's some ethernet port in my body that I plug a cable into that's delivering euphoric sensations I'm addicted to.
You'd be better off buying Everclear, which is about as close as I think you can legally get off the shelf (at least in my area, and I have to drive to the next state to do so).
The USA, following its revolution, implemented a system that was relatively novel at the time, and had not been tried on anywhere near that scale, at least in recent memory. Its leaders at the time were aware of the failings of the past (in their view), and tried to build a system that would counteract/prevent similar abuses.
We're now 240 some years later. While the USA's system has not, pretty much every other country that modeled its system on the US collapsed in one way or another. Its structure tends to accrete power to the executive, and has a strong preference for inertia and dysfunction in the absence of a significant degree of unity. The USA has avoided this fate thus far, but the underlying problems are making themselves much more manifest of late. The system has already failed catastrophically in the US once, leading to Civil War, and while that's unlikely in the present day, there isn't likely to be any sort of quick solution either.
This isn't a partisan thing either - pretty much every President has increased the power of the executive, overall, even if they entered office ideologically opposed to it. Even the one who was the most suspicious of the power of the executive, Jefferson, changed his mind when tempted by the offer of purchasing French Louisiana. Sure, some things get rolled back, but others get advanced, and even those that are rolled back tend to be two steps forward one step back. In that, we should not be surprised in the least that President Obama has gone back on what Candidate Obama promised in that area.
Personally, even if I agree with the policy in general, such as immigration deferrals, I don't like the fact that I see Congressional refusal to act on serious problems leading to unitary action by the executive. Even if I think the action is necessary, it sets precedents, and the more we set a tradition of doing things one way, the less the law actually matters in practice.
Yes - some of these articles wouldn't be bad, and would be legitimately funny, or at least arguably so, if mixed in with some actual regular articles. Unfortunately when it's a deluge of so many of them, with many of them bad, you hit a saturation point, at which I at least just stop caring, and stop bothering to want to play along with the joke.
This is pretty much how Facebook operates. They don't just suck in all the information of people who use their service, they collect information on everyone else. Even if you don't use Facebook, they've built a 'shadow' profile on you using information they've gotten from your friends and family. They're certainly not the only one that does so, but they're one of the most pervasive (at least in my opinion).
It's also why it's important to use something like Ghostery, to block the methods they're using to track people. Bottom line, if you don't see the Facebook "like" button load, you've got them blocked.
I'd much rather have the X37-B than the F-35. It's cheaper, and accomplishes a lot more (even without knowing whatever secret squirrel missions it's actually doing) as flying boondoggles/massive gifts to defense contractors go.
Well, those people did have a point, even if they didn't understand why at a direct level. Essentially, you need job skills/education/etc. You can't get by as a low or no skilled laborer, and companies are generally not willing to train you. You can't do the classic "start in the mail room and work your way up" anymore, especially not if you're straight out of high school.
The reason for the focus on "get a degree, any degree" is that for some time, that was necessary not for the specific training it provided, but because it showed "I am educated, I can function on this level, I can learn what you need me to learn" to employers. These days, it's not enough, because everyone wants you to already have experience or training.
This is why the focus is shifting to STEM - because that's what businesses are clamoring for more of. But at the same time, a laser-like focus on STEM degrees, or even just specific non-college vocational training programs, are going to leave people worse off. There's a reason universities mandate a core curriculum, because they're supposed to be turning out well-rounded graduates (even if most people just view the mandatory classes as something to be suffered through, not a place to learn something). I see people all the time in my IT sector job that don't have that background, either because they never went to college, or they mostly ignored those classes, and never learned to write in the organized manner that Bezos refers to.
Myself, I earned my BA in History. I then promptly went to work for the one US employer that still takes people based solely on aptitude, and offers to train them (even at great expense) - the US Military. That's certainly not a path for everyone though, or for every field, but I find that it's one that's done very well for me.
I seem to have been too subtle for my own joke - no one seemed to catch the reference to "walking chrome toasters", also known less colloquially as "Cylons."
Connections. It's all about your connections. The biggest thing you need to get into politics today, at least for either major party, is connections - mostly to donors and supporters. The best way to establish these is to start by working your way up from smaller levels, working with the local/state party, winning smaller offices, and moving on to bigger. It's how many of the successful presidential primary candidates started.
There are shortcuts though. For one, being the relative of a successful politician gives you access to their contacts. Rand Paul may have been outside of government prior to his Senate run, but his father was a nationally known politician. Al Gore is another example, as is George W. Bush, JEB Bush, Mitt Romney, Kennedy, etc etc.
The lone exception to this has been massively successful Generals - Grant and Eisenhower. In those cases, their profile was high enough and impressive enough that the contacts pretty much came to them.
Perot may be the other exception, but he ran a mostly self-financed independent campaign, and harnessed a lot of circumstances that I'm not sure are easily replicable in a given election. Had he tried to win the primary instead, I doubt he would have succeeded.
Unfortunately, there's an underlying mentality in some people that if you can't support yourself, you're basically worthless, and deserve to die. Nobody phrases it like that, because it's a horrible way to think... but that's the end result of it. Point out that it's the logical conclusion, and the response is something like "Well that's just not my problem, why should I support them if they're lazy and irresponsible?" Some of it is a lack of empathy, but mostly it's just distance. It's much harder to get people to care about hypotheticals, or with someone that they would never identify with and never see, than it is to get them to care about some poor cold starving wretch that's right in front of them (at least until they manage to desensitize themselves).
It's also something that comes from a highly understandable and logical notion. There was a time in the past where, if you were an able bodied adult that didn't contribute, you -were- a direct drain on everyone else around you. Back when a single bad harvest could mean the difference between starving or not, that was a life or death matter. If I didn't work, I would be putting you and the entire rest of the village/etc at risk, potentially. That's not the case anymore, not by a long shot - but notions like that don't just go away.
There's actually one spot along the income spectrum where the Laffer curve is actually correct. The problem is, it's right around the poverty line, at the point where your benefits drop off faster than your income increases. At that point, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by working harder/earning more, because you wind up with more money.
But good luck getting Republicans interested in fixing that, short of just having them gut the original benefits in the first place.
The rate at which unskilled and low-skilled labor will be made redundant by, or replaced by, automation, is going to continue accelerating. What happens to these people? They won't all be able to retrain into high-skill jobs, especially the ones that have already worked for some time. Do you seriously expect a 50 year old truck driver to turn into a computer programmer when he gets replaced by a driving robot (one that can, incidentally, work 24/7 and remain alert even in bad conditions)? I'm sure a few might be able to, but what about all the others?
In the past, it used to be that all you needed to be able to earn enough to get by was to simply be an able bodied adult male, that was willing to work hard. Likely you could even support a family. That's no longer the case, and really hasn't been for a long time. We've been relying on Government programs - ones originally intended as a "safety net" for those who had a run of bad luck to help them get back on their feet - to bridge the gap for more and more people. We're going to have to do more of it, and at the same time, we're going to have to do so against the current of a culture that has a tradition of valuing hard work, to the point of deriding and denigrating those who do not work, or rely on government assistance.
I think the long term solution is going to be to tax the productivity of robots, probably in the form of taxes on profits and capital (rather than on wages, which will likely decline), and in turn to institute a guaranteed basic income, that goes to every citizen. We might even want to eliminate taxes on wage earnings entirely, as crazy as that may sound, but it wouldn't be the first time that governments have switched their tax base. The USA originally funded itself based on tariffs and excise taxes, and income tax wasn't even legal until the constitution was amended to make it so.
No one would need to work to earn a living, though anyone would be free to do so in order to earn money beyond that. This has many benefits - for one, you could eliminate the cost of managing all the other mishmash of programs. You could eliminate the minimum wage, since no one is relying on wages to survive - let the market establish the real price of any labor. The biggest obstacle is going to be the mindset that anyone who doesn't work is worthless, and the "I don't want to pay to support those lazy bums" mindset (but this is why we'd want to stop taxing wage income).
Correct, it wouldn't go out as salary compensation - most executives make the bulk of their money from things like stock options rather than direct salary. You'd see increased returns to the shareholders, which would in turn benefit the executives who happen to also be shareholders as part of their compensation package.
I see a future full of bright, shining robots helping us, making life better for everyone in the states. They would walk our dogs, drive our cars, clean our houses, even hunt down terrorists and fight our wars. The streets would be full of robots, gleaming in the sun like walking chrome toasters.
It's not like they would ever turn on us and try to kill us.
For all I dislike the Republicans and all of their recent actions and policy proposals, I have to disagree on this. The base of their party is deep enough in wingnut land that they absolutely would back even a black woman, IF she gave full throated backing to all of their beliefs, dogmas, and notions. In fact, they'd absolutely relish throwing that in the face of the Left.
That said, this isn't something where they'll simply take anyone. Such a candidate would need to be in a position to take advantage of this, get access to donors, have the "experience" to push ahead. They'd need to be good at putting together and running a campaign. They'd need to be able to go toe to toe with all the other competitors and not stumble/look like an idiot/etc.
Part of the reason the Republican party fields minority candidates at lower rates isn't because they wouldn't back one - even Herman Cain had a moment where he was at the top of the polls, but he was a very flawed candidate once you got past the initial pitch. Go look at the following that Ben Carson has, and how many in the conservative base would love for him to run (and he might, though that doesn't mean he'll succeed, for the same reasons). No, it's because it's not easy to be a candidate for President without having worked your way up through lower offices, building a reputation, establishing contacts, etc. Every single successful candidate for either party in the last hundred years or so has. The only shortcut is through family connections, but even then they're running for Senator or Governor first. It's at the lower ranks that the potential candidates are weeded out, or just never given the opportunities to begin with.
Depends on what she's really running for. Recent history indicates that a lot of the second tier candidates for the Republican nomination have managed to sufficiently raise their profile in so doing, and gone on to reasonably lucrative work as commentators on various news networks, especially Fox.
Or, as someone snarked to me about one candidate or another recently, "He/she's running for a Commentator spot on Fox, not for President."
The Constitution doesn't tell the States (or DC for that matter) who can vote in their internal elections, or what sort of form those can take, save that it guarantees them a "republican form of government," meaning essentially that your state can't decide to replace its legislature with a hereditary Monarchy for instance. Most states mimic the federal government in form (executive, bicameral legislature, etc) but not all do - Nebraska for instance has a unicameral (one house) legislature.
The States though have some reasonable discretion at how they run their elections. While I find it difficult to think of a situation where a State might have more strict requirements for voting in its non-Federal election, there is precedent for a State allowing someone who can't vote in a federal election to vote in a state election. Prior to the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18, many States already allowed 18 year olds to vote in non-federal elections, and the Supreme Court upheld that Congress had the right to regulate the minimum age in federal elections, but not at the state and local level.
Now, whether that would extend to citizenship would be an interesting question, but there's certainly precedent for it in terms of both age and women being allowed to vote in state/local elections, when they could not do so in federal elections.
It takes two people to fire any of the nuclear weapons in the US (or Russian, or I believe any of the others') arsenal. A ballistic missile submarine only needs two people to turn their keys. And yet, that's enough to keep us from having a bunch of missiles wiping out several million people (and potentially provoking other strikes that cause millions more to die).
You're never going to be completely able to eliminate all risk. Even if you made it ten people, well, it's still theoretically possible that you could have a ten person suicide pact if they'd all secretly joined some sort of cult - but the risks are far, far lower. Having one person be a suicidal narcissist who's managed to escape screening or otherwise arouse suspicion is far more likely than two people doing so, who are in the same position to do something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
If everything else was equal, you'd be right.
However, you're completely discounting the advantages that you (or I) were given simply by the circumstances of our birth. Two centuries of official and unofficial repression mean that black families distinctly worse off in financial terms, and unable to provide the same advantages their children that we received. While some can overcome this, it's certainly not a level playing field if we just "left everything alone."
Now, perhaps a better approach might be to tackle this from the perspective of poverty, because there are certainly poor whites, and wealthy minority individuals, that do not fit the average. The problem with this is that because poverty in the USA tends to correlate very strongly with race, you also tend to see animosity in terms of race manifesting in opposition to any programs to benefit the poor. To be fair, that's not to say being against anti-poverty programs, government assistance, welfare, etc is ipso facto racism, merely that the two are often correlated. There are many who are not at all racist, but oppose welfare/social programs/etc because they strongly believe that poor people are poor because of their own failings, or other Calvinist sort of ideas, and while I would argue they're wrong, it's not necessarily racial. That said, keep in mind that many social programs like Social Security (originally), the WW2 GI Bill, and others, were designed to effectively exclude black people, in order to secure the backing of Southern Conservatives.
I find it extremely ironic that you rail against "Social Justice in Sci-Fi" and yet you hold up Star Trek, which has tended to be on the forefront of pushing for equality and, yes, social justice.
The Original Series had an INCREDIBLY diverse cast for a 1960s TV show. It may seem anodyne today, but it certainly wasn't then. This was so controversial that many network affiliates (primarily in the South) refused to air the episode where Captain Kirk and Uhura kissed, because at the time, an interracial kiss was simply THAT controversial.
Furthermore, Star Trek has always presented a utopian vision not just of technology, but of human (and interplanetary/alien) society. Heck, the Federation is essentially a completely socialist post-scarcity utopia where everyone gets everything they need because most resources are so abundant. I highly suggest you go back and watch it all again, and pay closer attention to that part of it, rather than just focusing on the recalibration of the deflector array and rerouting of inverted power from the warp core.
As far as the Hugo awards go... yes, demands to be inclusive can go too far, but that doesn't mean that being inclusive, or being aware of writers from previously disadvantaged groups, is a bad thing. As a society, we are nowhere near the point where everyone is on a truly level playing field.
Do you understand what happens when you end the Government's monopoly of the use of force? I don't think you really do.
I'll try to explain and illustrate. Do you know why organized criminal enterprises use force? It's generally not because they're engaged in robbery, though in cases they certainly can be. No, it's to protect their (illegal) lines of business, whether that's drugs or any number of other rackets. They are unable to rely on a neutral third party (i.e. the Government) to enforce their contracts, and so they rely on the threat of violence. If you don't pay Bank of America back, they go to the Government (Courts etc) to try and get whatever money they can from you. If you don't pay Mikey the Loan Shark back, he sends thugs to break your kneecaps. If you sell fake aspirin to CVS, you'll face civil and criminal penalties, get sued, etc. If you sell fake heroin to Mister Big, you'd best hope you arranged a nice life insurance payout for your family. Now, to a degree, some of it goes hand in hand in that those who break other laws and social conventions tend to lack moral qualms about doing so with respect to violence, but there's a large amount of amoral pragmatism in it too.
I completely fail to see how normalizing any of this is in anyone's best interest. Even simply allowing increased private use of force in a regulated manner is extremely problematic.
As far as being able to opt out, well... you can always leave. It may not be as easy as it once was, and you may say that your options are limited - but I'd also suggest that's because you want to enjoy many of the benefits of the society that you're so quick to decry.
I'd say if they don't want to be in that business line, then by all means they should sell it off. Running a regulated natural monopoly business like "being the dumb pipe" is a boring line of business, but it's also a reliable line of business. You won't make ridiculous profits in it, but you'll probably make steady (if small) profits. It's why we still have companies that run the power lines and water pipes and such. Better to have the companies that want to be in those lines of business take over.
And if significant infrastructure upgrades require investments of government/tax dollars... well, I'm perfectly okay with that too. I'd much rather have high speed fiber internet laid down in my county rather than, say, a new sports stadium.
Yes, this exactly. The golden age of the expansion of the commercial/consumer internet was when it was primarily run over the phone lines - dialup and DSL. The low barrier to entry allowed tons of new ISPs to enter the market, offering basic unlimited service for a flat rate. The incumbents at the time - AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and their ilk, were by and large ridiculously overpriced, not to mention did not offer any unlimited plans, with time-based metering. (To be fair they did offer additional services, but over time most people realized there were more/better free alternatives elsewhere on the open internet.)
Pretty soon everyone could get online, because everyone - even in rural areas - had landline phone service (not to mention electricity). Service was slow compared to today, but it was a limit of the current technology rather than any unwillingness of companies to invest or build out in a given area. Upgrades occured, up until about the point that dialup and DSL hit a wall where it was no longer feasible under current technology to increase bandwidth using the (government mandated Title II Unbundled) telephone lines.
Instead, most people were forced to switch to (proprietary bundled) cable lines to get high speed internet. Only recently have fiber lines been available for some lucky few, and most of us are still stuck at the mercy of our cable company. In the meantime, competition has all but disappeared, rates have shot up and service has become legendarily bad for many people.
So explain to me again why Title II is so horrible, because I'm really just not seeing it.
What you seem to miss is that the addition of computers and the internet does not substantially change activity or interaction, it merely removes the penalty of distance. I am not required to go walk/bike/drive over to my friend's house in order to talk to them, or play games with them. I can send letters without waiting any significant amount of time for a response. It is also not the first to do so - the telephone has long since made this possible for voice communication, albeit with certain limitations.
/sarcasm
And I'm sure society has never seen a trend of teenagers spending all day talking on the phone with their friends.
Now, do people get depressed and use the internet as a distraction or means to avoid the outside world? Absolutely. Can antisocial people use the internet as a buffer to put between themselves and others? Sure. Can someone waste time and avoid responsibility while doing nothing but play games? They certainly can. The internet makes some of these easier, but all of these things existed long before the internet. You still have yet to prove in any way that making contact and communication easier, and reducing the time penalty involved with each, has made some sort of transformative difference. I would be genuinely curious and interested if someone did, but until that time I'm going to remain skeptical.
Lastly, for someone who throws out accusations of impoliteness and antisocial behavior, I hate to point it out (well, no, actually I don't), but the one tossing insults at others in this thread is you.
That's not a disorder in the sense that the average person means it though. In some ways this is similar to all those stupid "X with a computer" patents, in that somehow people think that adding a computer into the equation makes it magically different. Obsessive compulsive behavior already is a disorder, and is entirely different from what people usually mean when they talk about "internet addiction." The internet, and anything associated with it, be that "excessive" gaming or Facebook or whatever, are at most a symptom of something else. There is no inherent chemical dependency involved any more than with any other activity.
If anything, this gets scapegoated by many people because it does not fit the old norms of human society. If those same youths were obsessively studying for schoolwork all day long, it would not elicit nearly the same reaction. If they spent their entire day socializing with friends in person, would anyone be surprised?
As for the definition of online versus offline, that's a somewhat tricky distinction to make. It would be safer to say that in an increasingly connected world it will be harder to find anything that is "completely offline" unless you specifically seek it out - but, again, it's not like there's some ethernet port in my body that I plug a cable into that's delivering euphoric sensations I'm addicted to.
You'd be better off buying Everclear, which is about as close as I think you can legally get off the shelf (at least in my area, and I have to drive to the next state to do so).
The USA, following its revolution, implemented a system that was relatively novel at the time, and had not been tried on anywhere near that scale, at least in recent memory. Its leaders at the time were aware of the failings of the past (in their view), and tried to build a system that would counteract/prevent similar abuses.
We're now 240 some years later. While the USA's system has not, pretty much every other country that modeled its system on the US collapsed in one way or another. Its structure tends to accrete power to the executive, and has a strong preference for inertia and dysfunction in the absence of a significant degree of unity. The USA has avoided this fate thus far, but the underlying problems are making themselves much more manifest of late. The system has already failed catastrophically in the US once, leading to Civil War, and while that's unlikely in the present day, there isn't likely to be any sort of quick solution either.
This isn't a partisan thing either - pretty much every President has increased the power of the executive, overall, even if they entered office ideologically opposed to it. Even the one who was the most suspicious of the power of the executive, Jefferson, changed his mind when tempted by the offer of purchasing French Louisiana. Sure, some things get rolled back, but others get advanced, and even those that are rolled back tend to be two steps forward one step back. In that, we should not be surprised in the least that President Obama has gone back on what Candidate Obama promised in that area.
Personally, even if I agree with the policy in general, such as immigration deferrals, I don't like the fact that I see Congressional refusal to act on serious problems leading to unitary action by the executive. Even if I think the action is necessary, it sets precedents, and the more we set a tradition of doing things one way, the less the law actually matters in practice.
Yes - some of these articles wouldn't be bad, and would be legitimately funny, or at least arguably so, if mixed in with some actual regular articles. Unfortunately when it's a deluge of so many of them, with many of them bad, you hit a saturation point, at which I at least just stop caring, and stop bothering to want to play along with the joke.
This is pretty much how Facebook operates. They don't just suck in all the information of people who use their service, they collect information on everyone else. Even if you don't use Facebook, they've built a 'shadow' profile on you using information they've gotten from your friends and family. They're certainly not the only one that does so, but they're one of the most pervasive (at least in my opinion).
It's also why it's important to use something like Ghostery, to block the methods they're using to track people. Bottom line, if you don't see the Facebook "like" button load, you've got them blocked.
I'd much rather have the X37-B than the F-35. It's cheaper, and accomplishes a lot more (even without knowing whatever secret squirrel missions it's actually doing) as flying boondoggles/massive gifts to defense contractors go.
Well, those people did have a point, even if they didn't understand why at a direct level. Essentially, you need job skills/education/etc. You can't get by as a low or no skilled laborer, and companies are generally not willing to train you. You can't do the classic "start in the mail room and work your way up" anymore, especially not if you're straight out of high school.
The reason for the focus on "get a degree, any degree" is that for some time, that was necessary not for the specific training it provided, but because it showed "I am educated, I can function on this level, I can learn what you need me to learn" to employers. These days, it's not enough, because everyone wants you to already have experience or training.
This is why the focus is shifting to STEM - because that's what businesses are clamoring for more of. But at the same time, a laser-like focus on STEM degrees, or even just specific non-college vocational training programs, are going to leave people worse off. There's a reason universities mandate a core curriculum, because they're supposed to be turning out well-rounded graduates (even if most people just view the mandatory classes as something to be suffered through, not a place to learn something). I see people all the time in my IT sector job that don't have that background, either because they never went to college, or they mostly ignored those classes, and never learned to write in the organized manner that Bezos refers to.
Myself, I earned my BA in History. I then promptly went to work for the one US employer that still takes people based solely on aptitude, and offers to train them (even at great expense) - the US Military. That's certainly not a path for everyone though, or for every field, but I find that it's one that's done very well for me.
I seem to have been too subtle for my own joke - no one seemed to catch the reference to "walking chrome toasters", also known less colloquially as "Cylons."
Connections. It's all about your connections. The biggest thing you need to get into politics today, at least for either major party, is connections - mostly to donors and supporters. The best way to establish these is to start by working your way up from smaller levels, working with the local/state party, winning smaller offices, and moving on to bigger. It's how many of the successful presidential primary candidates started.
There are shortcuts though. For one, being the relative of a successful politician gives you access to their contacts. Rand Paul may have been outside of government prior to his Senate run, but his father was a nationally known politician. Al Gore is another example, as is George W. Bush, JEB Bush, Mitt Romney, Kennedy, etc etc.
The lone exception to this has been massively successful Generals - Grant and Eisenhower. In those cases, their profile was high enough and impressive enough that the contacts pretty much came to them.
Perot may be the other exception, but he ran a mostly self-financed independent campaign, and harnessed a lot of circumstances that I'm not sure are easily replicable in a given election. Had he tried to win the primary instead, I doubt he would have succeeded.
Unfortunately, there's an underlying mentality in some people that if you can't support yourself, you're basically worthless, and deserve to die. Nobody phrases it like that, because it's a horrible way to think... but that's the end result of it. Point out that it's the logical conclusion, and the response is something like "Well that's just not my problem, why should I support them if they're lazy and irresponsible?" Some of it is a lack of empathy, but mostly it's just distance. It's much harder to get people to care about hypotheticals, or with someone that they would never identify with and never see, than it is to get them to care about some poor cold starving wretch that's right in front of them (at least until they manage to desensitize themselves).
It's also something that comes from a highly understandable and logical notion. There was a time in the past where, if you were an able bodied adult that didn't contribute, you -were- a direct drain on everyone else around you. Back when a single bad harvest could mean the difference between starving or not, that was a life or death matter. If I didn't work, I would be putting you and the entire rest of the village/etc at risk, potentially. That's not the case anymore, not by a long shot - but notions like that don't just go away.
There's actually one spot along the income spectrum where the Laffer curve is actually correct. The problem is, it's right around the poverty line, at the point where your benefits drop off faster than your income increases. At that point, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by working harder/earning more, because you wind up with more money.
But good luck getting Republicans interested in fixing that, short of just having them gut the original benefits in the first place.
The rate at which unskilled and low-skilled labor will be made redundant by, or replaced by, automation, is going to continue accelerating. What happens to these people? They won't all be able to retrain into high-skill jobs, especially the ones that have already worked for some time. Do you seriously expect a 50 year old truck driver to turn into a computer programmer when he gets replaced by a driving robot (one that can, incidentally, work 24/7 and remain alert even in bad conditions)? I'm sure a few might be able to, but what about all the others?
In the past, it used to be that all you needed to be able to earn enough to get by was to simply be an able bodied adult male, that was willing to work hard. Likely you could even support a family. That's no longer the case, and really hasn't been for a long time. We've been relying on Government programs - ones originally intended as a "safety net" for those who had a run of bad luck to help them get back on their feet - to bridge the gap for more and more people. We're going to have to do more of it, and at the same time, we're going to have to do so against the current of a culture that has a tradition of valuing hard work, to the point of deriding and denigrating those who do not work, or rely on government assistance.
I think the long term solution is going to be to tax the productivity of robots, probably in the form of taxes on profits and capital (rather than on wages, which will likely decline), and in turn to institute a guaranteed basic income, that goes to every citizen. We might even want to eliminate taxes on wage earnings entirely, as crazy as that may sound, but it wouldn't be the first time that governments have switched their tax base. The USA originally funded itself based on tariffs and excise taxes, and income tax wasn't even legal until the constitution was amended to make it so.
No one would need to work to earn a living, though anyone would be free to do so in order to earn money beyond that. This has many benefits - for one, you could eliminate the cost of managing all the other mishmash of programs. You could eliminate the minimum wage, since no one is relying on wages to survive - let the market establish the real price of any labor. The biggest obstacle is going to be the mindset that anyone who doesn't work is worthless, and the "I don't want to pay to support those lazy bums" mindset (but this is why we'd want to stop taxing wage income).
Correct, it wouldn't go out as salary compensation - most executives make the bulk of their money from things like stock options rather than direct salary. You'd see increased returns to the shareholders, which would in turn benefit the executives who happen to also be shareholders as part of their compensation package.
I see a future full of bright, shining robots helping us, making life better for everyone in the states. They would walk our dogs, drive our cars, clean our houses, even hunt down terrorists and fight our wars. The streets would be full of robots, gleaming in the sun like walking chrome toasters.
It's not like they would ever turn on us and try to kill us.
For all I dislike the Republicans and all of their recent actions and policy proposals, I have to disagree on this. The base of their party is deep enough in wingnut land that they absolutely would back even a black woman, IF she gave full throated backing to all of their beliefs, dogmas, and notions. In fact, they'd absolutely relish throwing that in the face of the Left.
That said, this isn't something where they'll simply take anyone. Such a candidate would need to be in a position to take advantage of this, get access to donors, have the "experience" to push ahead. They'd need to be good at putting together and running a campaign. They'd need to be able to go toe to toe with all the other competitors and not stumble/look like an idiot/etc.
Part of the reason the Republican party fields minority candidates at lower rates isn't because they wouldn't back one - even Herman Cain had a moment where he was at the top of the polls, but he was a very flawed candidate once you got past the initial pitch. Go look at the following that Ben Carson has, and how many in the conservative base would love for him to run (and he might, though that doesn't mean he'll succeed, for the same reasons). No, it's because it's not easy to be a candidate for President without having worked your way up through lower offices, building a reputation, establishing contacts, etc. Every single successful candidate for either party in the last hundred years or so has. The only shortcut is through family connections, but even then they're running for Senator or Governor first. It's at the lower ranks that the potential candidates are weeded out, or just never given the opportunities to begin with.
She ran for Senate (in 2010) in California, not Governor. Perhaps you're thinking of Meg Whitman, who ran for Governor of California?
Depends on what she's really running for. Recent history indicates that a lot of the second tier candidates for the Republican nomination have managed to sufficiently raise their profile in so doing, and gone on to reasonably lucrative work as commentators on various news networks, especially Fox.
Or, as someone snarked to me about one candidate or another recently, "He/she's running for a Commentator spot on Fox, not for President."
The Constitution doesn't tell the States (or DC for that matter) who can vote in their internal elections, or what sort of form those can take, save that it guarantees them a "republican form of government," meaning essentially that your state can't decide to replace its legislature with a hereditary Monarchy for instance. Most states mimic the federal government in form (executive, bicameral legislature, etc) but not all do - Nebraska for instance has a unicameral (one house) legislature.
The States though have some reasonable discretion at how they run their elections. While I find it difficult to think of a situation where a State might have more strict requirements for voting in its non-Federal election, there is precedent for a State allowing someone who can't vote in a federal election to vote in a state election. Prior to the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18, many States already allowed 18 year olds to vote in non-federal elections, and the Supreme Court upheld that Congress had the right to regulate the minimum age in federal elections, but not at the state and local level.
Now, whether that would extend to citizenship would be an interesting question, but there's certainly precedent for it in terms of both age and women being allowed to vote in state/local elections, when they could not do so in federal elections.
It takes two people to fire any of the nuclear weapons in the US (or Russian, or I believe any of the others') arsenal. A ballistic missile submarine only needs two people to turn their keys. And yet, that's enough to keep us from having a bunch of missiles wiping out several million people (and potentially provoking other strikes that cause millions more to die).
You're never going to be completely able to eliminate all risk. Even if you made it ten people, well, it's still theoretically possible that you could have a ten person suicide pact if they'd all secretly joined some sort of cult - but the risks are far, far lower. Having one person be a suicidal narcissist who's managed to escape screening or otherwise arouse suspicion is far more likely than two people doing so, who are in the same position to do something like this.