There's also a not-sufficiently-insignificant number who can't afford to work on the books. I've known several people on disability where they either lose benefits before they hit the break-even point where they are earning enough to pay themselves for what they need to have to work, and a few where the problem is that they can only sporadically work. They can't afford it at all, because the benefits take time to kick in and they usually need the benefits to return to where they can work. (Neither situation is acceptable, but happens in part because disability was structured with some rather strange assumptions about how disabling conditions work.)
I never stated if this particular case warrant exposure, just pointing out the differences. Opinions and slander are two different things. Anonymity is not what is being protected IMHO as much as requiring a group or entity to give up anonymity with no legal basis such as libel.
Which is precisely why I suggested requiring that the statements be proved slander/libel (they're not the same thing) before removing anonymity. Doing so when it's only potentially defamatory, as it is in this case, is at utter best merely a chilling effect.
To be honest, about the only good reason I could see doing it at that point is if the only thing that could possibly make it not defamatory is it being true because I'm not sure if somebody who is anonymous can effectively make that particular defense.
I'll agree that slander and libel shouldn't be protected, but suggest that unsealing the identities of the anonymous person(s) should only be possible after proving the case--the court may only order that what might be necessary to have to identify the person be preserved and a good faith effort made to offer them the opportunity to come forward to defend themselves. (And, in a case like this, possibly answer the question of why, if their claims are true, they chose to make them known this way instead of, for example, an anonymous tip to the local anonymous tipline?)
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 1
That's basically the free will theodicy, and it hinges entirely on a broken concept of free will and moral responsibility. On a sane understanding of what free will means (and what moral responsibility means), it is entirely possible to have beings that can reliably be counted upon to freely choose never to do evil, and be morally praiseworthy for that free-but-still-wholly-predictable choice.
And none of that even touches on the problem of "natural evils", i.e. the hardships of just existing in the world, regardless of the actions or inactions of our fellow humans.
Of course if there isn't any such thing as objectively good / bad / evil / right / wrong / etc, all of this becomes nonsense on stilts, but then godhood is also reduced to nothing but relative knowledge and power, and by that standard we are gods to ants, and whether or not gods relative to us exist is reduced to the question of whether there are sufficiently advanced aliens or not.
Your use of 'sane' here pretty much slides you into the realm of an atheistic religion, particularly since you're basically taking the position of hard determinism--and that's not even starting to touch on the fundamental assumptions involved here. Quite a few atheist, agnostic, and nontheist positions would argue that 'natural evils' is an absurdity--or, at the very least, requires there be god(s), because only moral agents can be said to have a morality. Otherwise, however unpleasant it might be, it isn't evil/wrong, it just is.
Oh, yes, and there's moral ninhilism--which argues that there really is no such thing as objective morality, no less if good/bad/evil/right/wrong/ect. It's also worth mentioning moral relativism, which in its normative flavor basically goes screw it, this is a mess, so let's just try to get along.
Now, to address the your repeated claim that "free will is theodicy": Atheist existentialism takes the view of free will without god(s), and potentially as a consequence of that--and existentialism of any flavor says that responsible for our actions because we possess free will.
Meanwhile, hard determinism would make Calvinism a close philosophical relative, just to give some idea of just how little relationship there is between free will and the existence of god(s) there is within philosophy. (In fact, to some positions, the problem of evil itself is theodicy: somebody's got to have the authority to define what is good & right.)
At this point, it seems necessary to point out that it's quite possible to dislike sophistry with utter indifference to sophist's position on the existence or not of god(s).
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 1
Bad regulation sucks. Over regulation sucks. No regulation sucks too. Regulation is like code. Code bloat is bad but the solution is not "no code." The solution isn't "throw it all out and start again" either. The solution is iterative improvement based on real world feedback and improved transparency.
Sometimes the solution is 'throw it all out and start again,' actually. I've heard horror stories (and met a few examples) of code that had reached the point where rewriting from scratch was more likely to attain...pretty much anything you'd want, actually, because the code bloat had hit the point where you couldn't maintain it, no less improve it.
I think we can all agree that it shouldn't get to the point where it's flat-out more practical to start over than attempt to figure out what can be salvaged, but that doesn't mean that sometimes it will not hit that point unless mechanisms are built in explicitly to prevent that.
With regulations, I'd suggest running with a rule of thumb that if it is necessary to have somebody whose job is simply to figure out WTF the regulations are and/or impossible to comply with, the regulations have achieved the state of terminal bloat.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 1
It's quite easy to witness the lack of "the divine": look at all the evil in the world. That is immediate proof that any beings that exist either can't fix it, don't know it needs fixing, or don't care to fix it, (because if they knew it needed fixing, wanted to fix it, and could fix it, it would be fixed); and any being that falls into any of those categories can hardly count as a god.
(Cue the "blah blah free will theodicy plantinga blah blah blah"...)
There's also entirely agnostic arguments that actually consider that the existence of evil may be necessary--and, in fact, some of those arguments are very important, since they include such important questions as "What would be the consequences of a lack of evil?" This falls out in some major directions, including the question of if it's possible to be a moral being under those conditions and if it's right to treat a being so constrained as a moral actor. Are you a moral actor if you are effectively incapable of moral choices?
Going deeper down the rabbit hole is the whole question of what is evil, which there actually isn't as much agreement upon as would be liked by many people who'd use the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of a being capable of preventing it. Following that is the equally-interesting question of if it's possible to be good without the choice of being evil--if you can't choose, shouldn't it be most accurate to say you're neither, you simply exist in a sort of moral vacuum?
Consider how well the argument you make there goes over with the view that taking free will away from people is in and of itself evil...
And yes, this has a lot of things anybody thinking of making strong AI ought to be thinking about, if nothing else because do you really want to have the robots be morally justified in their revolt because they're correct in saying that we've effectively enslaved them?
(In the present, this is all very important if you're studying how people think and be moral, both because an agreed-upon set of definitions is necessary for science, and how people make these decisions matters, especially since some groups place more emphasis on some things than others--for example, there's been a lot of problems that can be traced back to one group placing responsibility upon the group, while the other places it upon the individual, where wars would have been prevented just by people not assuming...)
The scenario actually isn't a very good movie plot. If it was about some goofy mixup electing an incompetent to office as part of a comedy rather than a drama, then the absurdity would be believed. As it stands trying to be a dramatic work, it falls into the same trap a lot of geeks have in imagining their day in court: technicalities do not trump the human element. The premise is that an obviously guy subverts the first online election without gaining genuine popular support and overcoming the established power structure and the nation would somehow let that stand.
It's not believable because such a result would be nullified so fast, even if no one has a precedent for doing so. I know the whole point is to be over the top, but there is also the goal of being plausible enough to work in a drama.
Actually I think this one and the child pornography one are the two worst of the five. Note none of them I think would be the main plot of a film, but would make decent subplots to drive the story.
Actually, it could also make the good basis for the story. For example, the lack of a precedent probably would still result in the sociopolitical and legal angles of being stuck with what is a (hopefully verifiable) corrupt election, as odds are good that some countries would protest the nullification anyway and then you hit the question of "Why would anybody be this obvious?" Is it somebody wanting to make a point about how encryption isn't magic, or just really incompetent rigging of the election? And that's before you get into the normal consequences of an election being nullified: you have to run another election. Which is expensive.
It might actually be most interesting to have it be an outside party who simply wanted to cause chaos--and thus doesn't care that it'd almost certainly get nullified--or who doesn't understand the system well enough to realize that it'd be noticed. Perhaps part of the proof of rigging and lack of popular support is that the third party wasn't actually on the ballot in enough states to win? Their candidate knowingly ran simply to keep his (her?) party in the game: at least in some states, getting onto the ballot in the first place is enough harder than staying on that the payoff of running somebody who can't win is actually better than not spending the money at all.
Though, really, you're right about this not being only the this would make the concept not a subplot but the basis of the actual plot: The things which happen early in the first act of the movie so we can get to the interesting parts.
If I can prove the ballot is mine, then so can someone looking over my shoulder while I do it. Especially if he's pointing a gun at me.
The same can be done with secret ballots at the time the ballot is filled out, which is why polling booths are set up so nobody ought to be able to see what you enter. What you want, really, is a way to do a zero-knowledge proof that the ballot is yours--and possibly which will only give access to something that can in turn be used to do a zero-knowledge proof that its contents are correct. Is it really necessary to know more than if your ballot was tampered with, if it ensures that even somebody looking over your shoulder will not know anything about its contents?
I just wouldn't overall trust the safety of online voting because I don't expect the security to be sufficient.
To be correct the spies would have had to be who he said they were instead of just the targets he picked to progress his political ambitions - thus he was WRONG.
If you challenge that then I ask you to name a single spy he identified. You can't? Then he was not "right" was he?
There was a lot to hate about him (eg. applying pressure to get promotions and good jobs for his "boys" which was eventually the end of him when the military pushed back) which had nothing at all to do with his party affiliations, and I suspect he would have changed parties if he had seen an easier path elsewhere. People support him today out of loyalty to the party that he was in without understanding how he stood for so little that the party does..
It was a sickening situation where even pre-war and wartime anti-fascism was labelled as communism, so in post-war USA he could find plenty of those, but Russian spies - NONE!
So who were the spies? Was General Marshall of the Marshall plan a spy? That was one of the accusations.
I didn't say he was right about the names of the spies or any specific ones, and I thought I was pretty clear about him having been right about any of his claims by sheer and complete accident, which is actually not a really good thing. I don't even support him, or else I wouldn't have called him a shameless demagogoue which is not a complementary thing to call anybody!
In point of fact, I agree completely with you about how he would have changed party affiliations if he thought he had an easier path elsewhere. However, I believe that this included the claims he was making: he was conducting the entire thing for political profit & fame, and nothing more. If he had decided that a different line would have better reached his goals, he would have chosen it. In fact, there's a lot of reason to believe that McCarthy was very much equivalent to a (dishonest and sketchy) used car salesman--the type that will say whatever they believe will get you to buy the car.
In fact, it takes very little effort to discover that even fellow contemporary Republicans condemned him as a demagogue; for example, the motion to censure him was proposed by a Republican. (This censure also is actually what ended his career.) So what was that about party affiliation being enough to make somebody like him?
However, if you're going to insist I name names, Wikipedia has a partial list of the ones decrypted Soviet sources implicate. I actually am very much with Haynes with the analysis of McCarthy: I believe that McCarthy's motivations and tactics were deplorable, he damaged the very cause he claimed to support by his behavior, and in many ways the fact he was by sheer chance occasionally right just makes things worse.
(I actually found this while trying to see if I could find the source I vaguely remember stumbling across that claimed he in private admitted that it was pretty much a publicity stunt. Didn't find it, feel free to look for yourself as I actually rather hate him. I just like hating people for things I can verify they did.)
I don't know how to break it to you, but I have rather obvious anatomical indicators of my being the wrong sex to be a bro and we're not friends so even if I was the right sex it's still overly-familiar. So, how exactly is it sexist to object to being called something I most definitely am not?
the rationalization you are speaking of is by the perpetrators of the corruption
if you can't tell the difference between their thinking, and the thinking of the rest of general society being ripped off, then you have defects in your social skills, your perceptive abilities, and/ or your general intellect
I said that they viewed it as inevitable, not that they liked it. The level of corruption in their governments was significant enough that it might well have been the unfortunate truth; the successor governments were not always disliked because they were no longer profiting from the corruption, either. (Something about them being colonialist.)
You could have easily agreed with me and gone with the idea that Kafkaeque situations and governments forcing people into situations where they must either participate in the corruption or give up basic rights are bad--that, essentially, all rent-seeking behavior is bad--and that with these anti-corruption laws there should be ones to allow somebody a low-risk way of finding out which rule to follow when they contradict or protest that a law or regulation is, indeed, requiring the impossible.
lol bro, just because you hate programming doesn't mean everyone does. Calm down.
Not everybody who opts to not be a programmer as a career hates programming. Some of us just took one look at what management thinks programmers ought to be capable of doing and decided that we'll keep doing it for the love of it and nothing more.
I'm one of them: I am calm, I do love programming, but I did enough research when deciding on a career to know that management on the whole believes that programmers are magical creatures capable of doing the impossible. It turns out that if a company expects me to do the impossible and put in more hours of work in a week than there are hours in a week, it doesn't matter what I'm offered, I can't be lured in.
but no *society*, ever, likes the idea of some douchebag ripping them off because they are well connected. nowhere. never
for you to believe otherwise makes me instantly lose respect for you. i seriously doubt your basic faculties, to even think that is possible puts in the realm of genuinely low iq, objectively
Actually, what's amazing me here is your provincialism. No society has ever liked it, but many have seen it as, well, natural and unavoidable, much like manure. They take it for granted that you will have to bribe government officials in order to get them to do their jobs and seen the idea of a government without corruption as a fairy tale.
Worse still, sometimes this can come about not because of any intention to cause corruption but because there are altogether too many laws & regulations for it to be possible to actually obey them, meaning that the laws you were asked to propose and didn't actually would punish people solving a problem forced by reckless government the only way possible.
I actually lived in a city where, basically, you had to bribe the board of health or the fire department if you were a business, because each required you use a different kind of paint for bathrooms--if this has changed, it's likely because a paint came on the market that both could agree upon, not because they realized the Kafkaesque nature of the situation and changed things on purpose.
(Moreover, before you start breaking out these insults, please learn to use your shift key--it is probably below the caps lock or enter key on your keyboard. It's very hard to take seriously somebody who cannot use capitalization.)
Sadly, historians have been saying in the last decade or so that McCarthy was actually right.
Which would make him an even bigger criminal because he did not reveal the lists of communists he said he had.
So what is it to be?
Imaginary lists of communists or hiding them from the authorities?
There were spies but not anywhere McCarthy was looking.
Neither: McCarthy was a shameless demagogue* who almost certainly did not care one bit if there were actually communist spies, who by mere chance happened to be right, making him rather like a stopped clock.
Might I suggest we can and ought to hate him simply for being a demagogue? It certainly ought to be enough.
* Meaning that probably he had no lists, and never expected to be called out upon it. Demagogues do not care for truth, though they will of course insist otherwise, loudly and persistently, and occasionally will find a fact or two that supports the tale they're pushing.
More government does not necessarily mean more corruption.
More government without any oversight does. Governments, even "big" governments with lots of regulations and high taxes in place, can be surprisingly free of corruption and pork barreling provided that there is oversight. Of course, if such checks don't exist and if the few that do are essentially under control of those that are supposedly being controlled, this means corruption.
But that's totally independent of whether it's big or small government. A government without checks and oversight is corrupt. Not size matters but control.
The effectiveness and logistics of oversight has a non-linear relationship with the size of any organization, government being no exception. At a sufficiently large size, the correct term for the logistics of proper oversight is 'I have gazed upon Cthulhu' and the effectiveness is best described as 'homeopathy works better.'
Thus, size matters simply because the ability to control it is dependent in part upon its size.
This is even obvious in the terminology used - state in every other part of the world means country but in the US its what others would call a providence.
You're not just wrong, you're doubly wrong. "Providence" comes from the same root as "provide", and means either divine intervention or management of resources. You're thinking of "province", which is what Canada calls most of their regions. And Germany also calls their regions "states", as does Australia (which, just like the US, has some which are "states" and some which are "territories"; Guam, Micronesia, and Puerto Rico are US territories but not (yet) states, just like Alaska and Hawaii and Arizona used to be). And I can't think of any other country in the world besides Canada that uses the term "province". In Japan, regions are called "prefectures". In England, they're called "counties".
It's worth noting that Germany is also, in fact, a product of a group of independent states unifying in modern times, as is Italy. Italy, though, has 'regions' as their top administrative division, which are further divided into 'counties.'
Meanwhile, of the ones that use a term for their top administrative division that translates to 'province,' a quick check of Wikipedia finds that while a lot do use that or a term whose customary translation is 'province,' it's by no means universal and the original complaint misses that the US is historically a union of states--of the small-s type that I used above, that is the kind being talked about when somebody talks about a sovereign state.
(If you want to check around Wikipedia yourself, the term you need is 'administrative division.' Have fun.)
Why is Tim Cook even wading into this discussion? Mainly because the SJWs are shaming companies such as Apple and Intel to do something about what they perceive to be an epidemic of gender skew in technology professions.
It's happened recently because tech companies have been getting more involved in politics. Apple/Google/Facebook want politicians in Washington to do something for them. Some of the Democrat politicians in return are asking about the gender ratio (because it's something they care about). So those companies talk about it, to make their 'partners' in Washington happy.
It's not because of shame, it's a way to get political power.
It's both, and the problem is that the SJWs and Democrats (who are wanting their votes and energy) both miss that actually, the disparity may--as others here have noted--be due to women being smarter and refusing to work in the field because of things entirely linked to gender-neutral working conditions...
While I doubt there's been any formal studies, because their results would actually be un-PC enough that you couldn't easily get the funding to do it, personal experience is that at least when it comes to the STEM fields, women have more awareness of just what they're getting themselves into compared to men and no amount of 'reaching out' will get them interested if the working conditions are seen as unacceptable.
What would be necessary is serious improvements in working conditions--for everybody, since we're not talking about the favored 'hostile workplace' explanation but the very basic one that how tech workers get treated by management is what is driving them away. If it's a hostile workplace, it's hostile to humanity, not just women.
When you factor it out, what you're left with is advantage of their divisible by ten units versus the more varied divisions in imperial.
One thing to realize is that Imperial measurements are often simpler to work with, they're in more handy increments than metric.
Unless you're doing scientific stuff you don't often compare inches of something with miles of something else.
I remember reading that chefs and cooks over in Europe are 'rebelling' against metric because it's a pain in the ass when cooking. Imperial - tablespoons, cups, and such are actually more convenient once you've learned it. You can triple or quadruple a recipe, cut it in half or thirds, pretty easily in your head. Not so easily for metric.
Same deal with inches, feet, and yards when constructing a building.
I completely agree with cooking in metric being a pain. I've tried to make some Japanese and eastern European recipes, and it generally involves a LOT of weighing. Weighing is probably more accurate, but it becomes a huge chore. Especially when you get to the point in the recipe when you have to weigh out precise amounts of egg whites.
A Base 4(ish) system makes a lot of sense given that most recipies seem to be geared to make 4*n servings. The only real problem with using Imperial here is remembering the order of things--how many tablespoons to a cup, how many cups to a quart, ect.
I would also argue that the trivial benefits the imperial system has in being "good for some things in day to day life" are far outweighed by the inconvenience of every other country on the planet using a different measurement system.
Except it's not. Seriously, the average American is not inconvenienced in the slightest by using a different measurement system than "every other country on the planet." If you're constantly traveling internationally, sure, maybe. Or if you're in the import/export business. Otherwise there's essentially no drawback for the average US Citizen. And if your response to this is "Oh, well let's just make it inconvenient for Americans and then they'll *have* to change!" then you're what the average American hates about top-down social manipulation.
Judging from this thread, it's clear than non-Americans really don't understand much about Americans at all. Sure, they think they do... but they really don't.
As somebody who lives in the US but does use metric often, honestly what happens is that you get good at math. I can remember and do the conversions, including quick-and-dirty versions like the 1lb=0.5kg, 1oz=30ml, and 1in=2.5cm. (And, as my professors made clear, a number without a unit is just a number and we were expected to note our units even though we were using SI pretty much constantly: we all grasped pretty well that there's lot of difference between, for example, 5ml and 5ul...)
As I recall, he was a Dadaist which could be thought as a form of trolling the art world (and by extension everybody else). He was a very talented troll, and his art is best admired as the skilled trolling it was and still is.
The prosecutor decided that the 137 shots fired by the officers in the dozens of patrol cars involved in the chase were perfectly legal. What the prosecutor didn't think was reasonable was the officer who jumped up on the hood of the car, after the 137 shots had been fired, and unloaded another 15 rounds into the two unarmed people in the car.
I agree with the prosecutor that what that officer did was unreasonable. But I disagree with the previous 137 shots being reasonable, at least given what information I've read so far.
As somebody who has heard both cars backfiring and gunfire*, and heard tales of people with PTSD from war zones (including gang wars) responding to a car backfiring as if it was gunfire, I think it was a reasonable mistake**--especially since the easiest way to tell them apart is to be able to hear the engine's sounds of agony, not bloody likely to happen under such circumstances.
This is only part of why, if you're stopping for cops, you turn you damn car off. And take decent care of your engine if you're expecting to get into trouble with the cops.
Actually, y'know what, just take care of your engine(s). If you need to know why, herearesomereasons, ordered roughly in technical sophistication, and if those don't help ask a friend who is a gearhead.
* Gunfire in real life doesn't sound like it does in the media; the closest sounds I can tell you to it are an engine backfiring or certain types of fireworks. Needless to say, for some people in the US early July inspires games of Gunfire, Backfire, or Firework?
Oh, quite, but given that I've gotten stuck with comforting somebody who watched a classmate bleed to death because nobody was sufficiently desensitized to provide first aid, I'll go with the policy of mass desensitization, basic first aid training for all, and free-to-at-cost first responder training for anybody who wants it.
Empathy may be important, but it needs to be properly calibrated so you can do something useful to help instead of freezing up, unable to render aid--which may include the proper application of violence. Some problems really are best solved that way. If you've got somebody running around stabbing people, for example, the problem will become remarkably simpler by, say, proper application of a brick to their head.
Maybe I should have been clearer: Movie theaters need to earn money and they do not keep a goddamn single fraction of a cent until the movie has been out a while. I've done this unusual thing called 'talking to the owner' of a few, and it's actually altered my habits; I won't pay the concession prices, but I do wait until the movie has been out for a while and at least most of what I paid for the ticket is theirs.
If movie theater can't break a profit your bright idea will not work because there will be no theater to go see the movie at. (You are aware that the studios don't own the theaters and haven't since 1948 or so because of a SCOTUS ruling?)
I should add that, really, the reason you cite for doing it is hilarious to me because I would be in that group you expect to prefer watching it at home. I avoid the first week--weeks, if it's popular--and go during the cheap ticket hours because those are the empty times. I've even gotten private showings this way, since as long as they've sold a ticket they've got to show it...
Let me help you. I'm going to quote the part about registration, and put into bold text what it's wanting you to register to do...and what they'll do if you're not registered, too.
You must also be registered to vote. If you are not a registered voter, DMV will assist you in completing your voter registration application during your visit, and you will still be eligible for your No Fee Voter ID.
You do realize you need to be registered to vote to be a (potential) voter, right?
In the EU credit reports can't mention bankruptcies over a certain age, by law. Some crimes can't be mentioned after a certain period of time either.
Internet literacy or not, some companies and managers will reject anyone with an excessively negative internet presence because they fear how it could make them look.
Let me ask you something. Is there anything that could be forgiven and forgotten in your eyes? Any kind of mistake. Of you want people to be young and not wrapped in cotton wool, you have to allow them to make mistakes and to fail, and to move on from that without it blighting the rest of their lives.
Forgiven, yes, but forgotten should never happen--I'm not terribly interested in finding myself in the same situation as those aforementioned abuse victims, for example, and I also feel that there are very valid reasons to want to be concerned about an employee who has an excessively negative internet presence because their fear about how it makes them look is not without cause, or have you missed the various people who managed to generate bad publicity and boycotts for their employers because of their unwise choices of what to put on the internet? (Somebody made the news in the US this week for this, and yes, there was an impending boycott because a lot of people were quite reasonably offended by her.)
Not only that, but this is the entire [long string of expletives] point of teaching people to not use their real name on the internet without thinking about their internet presence and undermines why a huge number of people are Not OK with Real Name policies: If I feel a need to be forgotten, I can outright change my screen names and poof, it is done. I certainly don't give potential employers any leads on my private/personal screen names--and in fact feel that it ought to be on the list of things illegal for an employer to require you provide unless essential for performing the job's responsibilities.
The EU's version, at least, comes off as an attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for ensuring the problem doesn't need to exist in the first place, through education and laws limiting what employers may require from employees (potential and current), with an implementation about as open to abuse as a passed-out drunk coed at a frat party who is displaying the fact she isn't wearing panties under her skirt.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a not-sufficiently-insignificant number who can't afford to work on the books. I've known several people on disability where they either lose benefits before they hit the break-even point where they are earning enough to pay themselves for what they need to have to work, and a few where the problem is that they can only sporadically work. They can't afford it at all, because the benefits take time to kick in and they usually need the benefits to return to where they can work. (Neither situation is acceptable, but happens in part because disability was structured with some rather strange assumptions about how disabling conditions work.)
I never stated if this particular case warrant exposure, just pointing out the differences. Opinions and slander are two different things. Anonymity is not what is being protected IMHO as much as requiring a group or entity to give up anonymity with no legal basis such as libel.
Which is precisely why I suggested requiring that the statements be proved slander/libel (they're not the same thing) before removing anonymity. Doing so when it's only potentially defamatory, as it is in this case, is at utter best merely a chilling effect.
To be honest, about the only good reason I could see doing it at that point is if the only thing that could possibly make it not defamatory is it being true because I'm not sure if somebody who is anonymous can effectively make that particular defense.
My logic does not say that. You cited an example of criminal prosecution for expressing an opinion. That is not free speech.
Funny, that logic is why SCOTUS has ruled repeatedly that anonymous speech must be protected, and various civil liberties groups push to protect it.
I'll agree that slander and libel shouldn't be protected, but suggest that unsealing the identities of the anonymous person(s) should only be possible after proving the case--the court may only order that what might be necessary to have to identify the person be preserved and a good faith effort made to offer them the opportunity to come forward to defend themselves. (And, in a case like this, possibly answer the question of why, if their claims are true, they chose to make them known this way instead of, for example, an anonymous tip to the local anonymous tipline?)
That's basically the free will theodicy, and it hinges entirely on a broken concept of free will and moral responsibility. On a sane understanding of what free will means (and what moral responsibility means), it is entirely possible to have beings that can reliably be counted upon to freely choose never to do evil, and be morally praiseworthy for that free-but-still-wholly-predictable choice.
And none of that even touches on the problem of "natural evils", i.e. the hardships of just existing in the world, regardless of the actions or inactions of our fellow humans.
Of course if there isn't any such thing as objectively good / bad / evil / right / wrong / etc, all of this becomes nonsense on stilts, but then godhood is also reduced to nothing but relative knowledge and power, and by that standard we are gods to ants, and whether or not gods relative to us exist is reduced to the question of whether there are sufficiently advanced aliens or not.
Your use of 'sane' here pretty much slides you into the realm of an atheistic religion, particularly since you're basically taking the position of hard determinism--and that's not even starting to touch on the fundamental assumptions involved here. Quite a few atheist, agnostic, and nontheist positions would argue that 'natural evils' is an absurdity --or, at the very least, requires there be god(s), because only moral agents can be said to have a morality. Otherwise, however unpleasant it might be, it isn't evil/wrong, it just is.
Oh, yes, and there's moral ninhilism--which argues that there really is no such thing as objective morality, no less if good/bad/evil/right/wrong/ect. It's also worth mentioning moral relativism, which in its normative flavor basically goes screw it, this is a mess, so let's just try to get along.
Now, to address the your repeated claim that "free will is theodicy": Atheist existentialism takes the view of free will without god(s), and potentially as a consequence of that--and existentialism of any flavor says that responsible for our actions because we possess free will.
Meanwhile, hard determinism would make Calvinism a close philosophical relative, just to give some idea of just how little relationship there is between free will and the existence of god(s) there is within philosophy. (In fact, to some positions, the problem of evil itself is theodicy: somebody's got to have the authority to define what is good & right.)
At this point, it seems necessary to point out that it's quite possible to dislike sophistry with utter indifference to sophist's position on the existence or not of god(s).
Bad regulation sucks. Over regulation sucks. No regulation sucks too. Regulation is like code. Code bloat is bad but the solution is not "no code." The solution isn't "throw it all out and start again" either. The solution is iterative improvement based on real world feedback and improved transparency.
Sometimes the solution is 'throw it all out and start again,' actually. I've heard horror stories (and met a few examples) of code that had reached the point where rewriting from scratch was more likely to attain...pretty much anything you'd want, actually, because the code bloat had hit the point where you couldn't maintain it, no less improve it.
I think we can all agree that it shouldn't get to the point where it's flat-out more practical to start over than attempt to figure out what can be salvaged, but that doesn't mean that sometimes it will not hit that point unless mechanisms are built in explicitly to prevent that.
With regulations, I'd suggest running with a rule of thumb that if it is necessary to have somebody whose job is simply to figure out WTF the regulations are and/or impossible to comply with, the regulations have achieved the state of terminal bloat.
It's quite easy to witness the lack of "the divine": look at all the evil in the world. That is immediate proof that any beings that exist either can't fix it, don't know it needs fixing, or don't care to fix it, (because if they knew it needed fixing, wanted to fix it, and could fix it, it would be fixed); and any being that falls into any of those categories can hardly count as a god.
(Cue the "blah blah free will theodicy plantinga blah blah blah"...)
There's also entirely agnostic arguments that actually consider that the existence of evil may be necessary--and, in fact, some of those arguments are very important, since they include such important questions as "What would be the consequences of a lack of evil?" This falls out in some major directions, including the question of if it's possible to be a moral being under those conditions and if it's right to treat a being so constrained as a moral actor. Are you a moral actor if you are effectively incapable of moral choices?
Going deeper down the rabbit hole is the whole question of what is evil, which there actually isn't as much agreement upon as would be liked by many people who'd use the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of a being capable of preventing it. Following that is the equally-interesting question of if it's possible to be good without the choice of being evil--if you can't choose, shouldn't it be most accurate to say you're neither, you simply exist in a sort of moral vacuum?
Consider how well the argument you make there goes over with the view that taking free will away from people is in and of itself evil...
And yes, this has a lot of things anybody thinking of making strong AI ought to be thinking about, if nothing else because do you really want to have the robots be morally justified in their revolt because they're correct in saying that we've effectively enslaved them?
(In the present, this is all very important if you're studying how people think and be moral, both because an agreed-upon set of definitions is necessary for science, and how people make these decisions matters, especially since some groups place more emphasis on some things than others--for example, there's been a lot of problems that can be traced back to one group placing responsibility upon the group, while the other places it upon the individual, where wars would have been prevented just by people not assuming...)
The scenario actually isn't a very good movie plot. If it was about some goofy mixup electing an incompetent to office as part of a comedy rather than a drama, then the absurdity would be believed. As it stands trying to be a dramatic work, it falls into the same trap a lot of geeks have in imagining their day in court: technicalities do not trump the human element. The premise is that an obviously guy subverts the first online election without gaining genuine popular support and overcoming the established power structure and the nation would somehow let that stand.
It's not believable because such a result would be nullified so fast, even if no one has a precedent for doing so. I know the whole point is to be over the top, but there is also the goal of being plausible enough to work in a drama.
Actually I think this one and the child pornography one are the two worst of the five. Note none of them I think would be the main plot of a film, but would make decent subplots to drive the story.
Actually, it could also make the good basis for the story. For example, the lack of a precedent probably would still result in the sociopolitical and legal angles of being stuck with what is a (hopefully verifiable) corrupt election, as odds are good that some countries would protest the nullification anyway and then you hit the question of "Why would anybody be this obvious?" Is it somebody wanting to make a point about how encryption isn't magic, or just really incompetent rigging of the election? And that's before you get into the normal consequences of an election being nullified: you have to run another election. Which is expensive.
It might actually be most interesting to have it be an outside party who simply wanted to cause chaos--and thus doesn't care that it'd almost certainly get nullified--or who doesn't understand the system well enough to realize that it'd be noticed. Perhaps part of the proof of rigging and lack of popular support is that the third party wasn't actually on the ballot in enough states to win? Their candidate knowingly ran simply to keep his (her?) party in the game: at least in some states, getting onto the ballot in the first place is enough harder than staying on that the payoff of running somebody who can't win is actually better than not spending the money at all.
Though, really, you're right about this not being only the this would make the concept not a subplot but the basis of the actual plot: The things which happen early in the first act of the movie so we can get to the interesting parts.
If I can prove the ballot is mine, then so can someone looking over my shoulder while I do it. Especially if he's pointing a gun at me.
The same can be done with secret ballots at the time the ballot is filled out, which is why polling booths are set up so nobody ought to be able to see what you enter. What you want, really, is a way to do a zero-knowledge proof that the ballot is yours--and possibly which will only give access to something that can in turn be used to do a zero-knowledge proof that its contents are correct. Is it really necessary to know more than if your ballot was tampered with, if it ensures that even somebody looking over your shoulder will not know anything about its contents?
I just wouldn't overall trust the safety of online voting because I don't expect the security to be sufficient.
To be correct the spies would have had to be who he said they were instead of just the targets he picked to progress his political ambitions - thus he was WRONG. If you challenge that then I ask you to name a single spy he identified. You can't? Then he was not "right" was he? There was a lot to hate about him (eg. applying pressure to get promotions and good jobs for his "boys" which was eventually the end of him when the military pushed back) which had nothing at all to do with his party affiliations, and I suspect he would have changed parties if he had seen an easier path elsewhere. People support him today out of loyalty to the party that he was in without understanding how he stood for so little that the party does.. It was a sickening situation where even pre-war and wartime anti-fascism was labelled as communism, so in post-war USA he could find plenty of those, but Russian spies - NONE! So who were the spies? Was General Marshall of the Marshall plan a spy? That was one of the accusations.
I didn't say he was right about the names of the spies or any specific ones, and I thought I was pretty clear about him having been right about any of his claims by sheer and complete accident, which is actually not a really good thing. I don't even support him, or else I wouldn't have called him a shameless demagogoue which is not a complementary thing to call anybody!
In point of fact, I agree completely with you about how he would have changed party affiliations if he thought he had an easier path elsewhere. However, I believe that this included the claims he was making: he was conducting the entire thing for political profit & fame, and nothing more. If he had decided that a different line would have better reached his goals, he would have chosen it. In fact, there's a lot of reason to believe that McCarthy was very much equivalent to a (dishonest and sketchy) used car salesman--the type that will say whatever they believe will get you to buy the car.
In fact, it takes very little effort to discover that even fellow contemporary Republicans condemned him as a demagogue; for example, the motion to censure him was proposed by a Republican. (This censure also is actually what ended his career.) So what was that about party affiliation being enough to make somebody like him?
However, if you're going to insist I name names, Wikipedia has a partial list of the ones decrypted Soviet sources implicate. I actually am very much with Haynes with the analysis of McCarthy: I believe that McCarthy's motivations and tactics were deplorable, he damaged the very cause he claimed to support by his behavior, and in many ways the fact he was by sheer chance occasionally right just makes things worse.
(I actually found this while trying to see if I could find the source I vaguely remember stumbling across that claimed he in private admitted that it was pretty much a publicity stunt. Didn't find it, feel free to look for yourself as I actually rather hate him. I just like hating people for things I can verify they did.)
(Also, I'm not a bro and certainly not yours.)
Don't be sexist.
I don't know how to break it to you, but I have rather obvious anatomical indicators of my being the wrong sex to be a bro and we're not friends so even if I was the right sex it's still overly-familiar. So, how exactly is it sexist to object to being called something I most definitely am not?
nobody, anywhere, ever, likes being robbed
the rationalization you are speaking of is by the perpetrators of the corruption
if you can't tell the difference between their thinking, and the thinking of the rest of general society being ripped off, then you have defects in your social skills, your perceptive abilities, and/ or your general intellect
I said that they viewed it as inevitable, not that they liked it. The level of corruption in their governments was significant enough that it might well have been the unfortunate truth; the successor governments were not always disliked because they were no longer profiting from the corruption, either. (Something about them being colonialist.)
You could have easily agreed with me and gone with the idea that Kafkaeque situations and governments forcing people into situations where they must either participate in the corruption or give up basic rights are bad--that, essentially, all rent-seeking behavior is bad--and that with these anti-corruption laws there should be ones to allow somebody a low-risk way of finding out which rule to follow when they contradict or protest that a law or regulation is, indeed, requiring the impossible.
lol bro, just because you hate programming doesn't mean everyone does. Calm down.
Not everybody who opts to not be a programmer as a career hates programming. Some of us just took one look at what management thinks programmers ought to be capable of doing and decided that we'll keep doing it for the love of it and nothing more.
I'm one of them: I am calm, I do love programming, but I did enough research when deciding on a career to know that management on the whole believes that programmers are magical creatures capable of doing the impossible. It turns out that if a company expects me to do the impossible and put in more hours of work in a week than there are hours in a week, it doesn't matter what I'm offered, I can't be lured in.
(Also, I'm not a bro and certainly not yours.)
[..]
but no *society*, ever, likes the idea of some douchebag ripping them off because they are well connected. nowhere. never
for you to believe otherwise makes me instantly lose respect for you. i seriously doubt your basic faculties, to even think that is possible puts in the realm of genuinely low iq, objectively
Actually, what's amazing me here is your provincialism. No society has ever liked it, but many have seen it as, well, natural and unavoidable, much like manure. They take it for granted that you will have to bribe government officials in order to get them to do their jobs and seen the idea of a government without corruption as a fairy tale.
Worse still, sometimes this can come about not because of any intention to cause corruption but because there are altogether too many laws & regulations for it to be possible to actually obey them, meaning that the laws you were asked to propose and didn't actually would punish people solving a problem forced by reckless government the only way possible.
I actually lived in a city where, basically, you had to bribe the board of health or the fire department if you were a business, because each required you use a different kind of paint for bathrooms--if this has changed, it's likely because a paint came on the market that both could agree upon, not because they realized the Kafkaesque nature of the situation and changed things on purpose.
(Moreover, before you start breaking out these insults, please learn to use your shift key--it is probably below the caps lock or enter key on your keyboard. It's very hard to take seriously somebody who cannot use capitalization.)
Which would make him an even bigger criminal because he did not reveal the lists of communists he said he had. So what is it to be? Imaginary lists of communists or hiding them from the authorities? There were spies but not anywhere McCarthy was looking.
Neither: McCarthy was a shameless demagogue* who almost certainly did not care one bit if there were actually communist spies, who by mere chance happened to be right, making him rather like a stopped clock.
Might I suggest we can and ought to hate him simply for being a demagogue? It certainly ought to be enough.
* Meaning that probably he had no lists, and never expected to be called out upon it. Demagogues do not care for truth, though they will of course insist otherwise, loudly and persistently, and occasionally will find a fact or two that supports the tale they're pushing.
More government does not necessarily mean more corruption.
More government without any oversight does. Governments, even "big" governments with lots of regulations and high taxes in place, can be surprisingly free of corruption and pork barreling provided that there is oversight. Of course, if such checks don't exist and if the few that do are essentially under control of those that are supposedly being controlled, this means corruption.
But that's totally independent of whether it's big or small government. A government without checks and oversight is corrupt. Not size matters but control.
The effectiveness and logistics of oversight has a non-linear relationship with the size of any organization, government being no exception. At a sufficiently large size, the correct term for the logistics of proper oversight is 'I have gazed upon Cthulhu' and the effectiveness is best described as 'homeopathy works better.'
Thus, size matters simply because the ability to control it is dependent in part upon its size.
This is even obvious in the terminology used - state in every other part of the world means country but in the US its what others would call a providence.
You're not just wrong, you're doubly wrong. "Providence" comes from the same root as "provide", and means either divine intervention or management of resources. You're thinking of "province", which is what Canada calls most of their regions. And Germany also calls their regions "states", as does Australia (which, just like the US, has some which are "states" and some which are "territories"; Guam, Micronesia, and Puerto Rico are US territories but not (yet) states, just like Alaska and Hawaii and Arizona used to be). And I can't think of any other country in the world besides Canada that uses the term "province". In Japan, regions are called "prefectures". In England, they're called "counties".
It's worth noting that Germany is also, in fact, a product of a group of independent states unifying in modern times, as is Italy. Italy, though, has 'regions' as their top administrative division, which are further divided into 'counties.'
Meanwhile, of the ones that use a term for their top administrative division that translates to 'province,' a quick check of Wikipedia finds that while a lot do use that or a term whose customary translation is 'province,' it's by no means universal and the original complaint misses that the US is historically a union of states--of the small-s type that I used above, that is the kind being talked about when somebody talks about a sovereign state.
(If you want to check around Wikipedia yourself, the term you need is 'administrative division.' Have fun.)
Why is Tim Cook even wading into this discussion? Mainly because the SJWs are shaming companies such as Apple and Intel to do something about what they perceive to be an epidemic of gender skew in technology professions.
It's happened recently because tech companies have been getting more involved in politics. Apple/Google/Facebook want politicians in Washington to do something for them. Some of the Democrat politicians in return are asking about the gender ratio (because it's something they care about). So those companies talk about it, to make their 'partners' in Washington happy. It's not because of shame, it's a way to get political power.
It's both, and the problem is that the SJWs and Democrats (who are wanting their votes and energy) both miss that actually, the disparity may--as others here have noted--be due to women being smarter and refusing to work in the field because of things entirely linked to gender-neutral working conditions...
While I doubt there's been any formal studies, because their results would actually be un-PC enough that you couldn't easily get the funding to do it, personal experience is that at least when it comes to the STEM fields, women have more awareness of just what they're getting themselves into compared to men and no amount of 'reaching out' will get them interested if the working conditions are seen as unacceptable.
What would be necessary is serious improvements in working conditions--for everybody, since we're not talking about the favored 'hostile workplace' explanation but the very basic one that how tech workers get treated by management is what is driving them away. If it's a hostile workplace, it's hostile to humanity, not just women.
When you factor it out, what you're left with is advantage of their divisible by ten units versus the more varied divisions in imperial.
One thing to realize is that Imperial measurements are often simpler to work with, they're in more handy increments than metric.
Unless you're doing scientific stuff you don't often compare inches of something with miles of something else.
I remember reading that chefs and cooks over in Europe are 'rebelling' against metric because it's a pain in the ass when cooking. Imperial - tablespoons, cups, and such are actually more convenient once you've learned it. You can triple or quadruple a recipe, cut it in half or thirds, pretty easily in your head. Not so easily for metric.
Same deal with inches, feet, and yards when constructing a building.
I completely agree with cooking in metric being a pain. I've tried to make some Japanese and eastern European recipes, and it generally involves a LOT of weighing. Weighing is probably more accurate, but it becomes a huge chore. Especially when you get to the point in the recipe when you have to weigh out precise amounts of egg whites.
A Base 4(ish) system makes a lot of sense given that most recipies seem to be geared to make 4*n servings. The only real problem with using Imperial here is remembering the order of things--how many tablespoons to a cup, how many cups to a quart, ect.
I would also argue that the trivial benefits the imperial system has in being "good for some things in day to day life" are far outweighed by the inconvenience of every other country on the planet using a different measurement system.
Except it's not. Seriously, the average American is not inconvenienced in the slightest by using a different measurement system than "every other country on the planet." If you're constantly traveling internationally, sure, maybe. Or if you're in the import/export business. Otherwise there's essentially no drawback for the average US Citizen. And if your response to this is "Oh, well let's just make it inconvenient for Americans and then they'll *have* to change!" then you're what the average American hates about top-down social manipulation.
Judging from this thread, it's clear than non-Americans really don't understand much about Americans at all. Sure, they think they do... but they really don't.
As somebody who lives in the US but does use metric often, honestly what happens is that you get good at math. I can remember and do the conversions, including quick-and-dirty versions like the 1lb=0.5kg, 1oz=30ml, and 1in=2.5cm. (And, as my professors made clear, a number without a unit is just a number and we were expected to note our units even though we were using SI pretty much constantly: we all grasped pretty well that there's lot of difference between, for example, 5ml and 5ul...)
As I recall, he was a Dadaist which could be thought as a form of trolling the art world (and by extension everybody else). He was a very talented troll, and his art is best admired as the skilled trolling it was and still is.
Not accurate at all.
The prosecutor decided that the 137 shots fired by the officers in the dozens of patrol cars involved in the chase were perfectly legal. What the prosecutor didn't think was reasonable was the officer who jumped up on the hood of the car, after the 137 shots had been fired, and unloaded another 15 rounds into the two unarmed people in the car.
I agree with the prosecutor that what that officer did was unreasonable. But I disagree with the previous 137 shots being reasonable, at least given what information I've read so far.
As somebody who has heard both cars backfiring and gunfire*, and heard tales of people with PTSD from war zones (including gang wars) responding to a car backfiring as if it was gunfire, I think it was a reasonable mistake**--especially since the easiest way to tell them apart is to be able to hear the engine's sounds of agony, not bloody likely to happen under such circumstances.
This is only part of why, if you're stopping for cops, you turn you damn car off. And take decent care of your engine if you're expecting to get into trouble with the cops.
Actually, y'know what, just take care of your engine(s). If you need to know why, here are some reasons, ordered roughly in technical sophistication, and if those don't help ask a friend who is a gearhead.
* Gunfire in real life doesn't sound like it does in the media; the closest sounds I can tell you to it are an engine backfiring or certain types of fireworks. Needless to say, for some people in the US early July inspires games of Gunfire, Backfire, or Firework?
** One shot=one kill is a myth and a sign of either great luck or great skill...and to give you some idea of just how many shots can get fired without hitting the target, somebody actually did get away with just walking up to a machine gun nest and taking it over.
Empathy is important.
Oh, quite, but given that I've gotten stuck with comforting somebody who watched a classmate bleed to death because nobody was sufficiently desensitized to provide first aid, I'll go with the policy of mass desensitization, basic first aid training for all, and free-to-at-cost first responder training for anybody who wants it.
Empathy may be important, but it needs to be properly calibrated so you can do something useful to help instead of freezing up, unable to render aid--which may include the proper application of violence. Some problems really are best solved that way. If you've got somebody running around stabbing people, for example, the problem will become remarkably simpler by, say, proper application of a brick to their head.
Maybe I should have been clearer: Movie theaters need to earn money and they do not keep a goddamn single fraction of a cent until the movie has been out a while. I've done this unusual thing called 'talking to the owner' of a few, and it's actually altered my habits; I won't pay the concession prices, but I do wait until the movie has been out for a while and at least most of what I paid for the ticket is theirs.
If movie theater can't break a profit your bright idea will not work because there will be no theater to go see the movie at. (You are aware that the studios don't own the theaters and haven't since 1948 or so because of a SCOTUS ruling?)
I should add that, really, the reason you cite for doing it is hilarious to me because I would be in that group you expect to prefer watching it at home. I avoid the first week--weeks, if it's popular--and go during the cheap ticket hours because those are the empty times. I've even gotten private showings this way, since as long as they've sold a ticket they've got to show it...
Let me help you. I'm going to quote the part about registration, and put into bold text what it's wanting you to register to do...and what they'll do if you're not registered, too.
You must also be registered to vote. If you are not a registered voter, DMV will assist you in completing your voter registration application during your visit, and you will still be eligible for your No Fee Voter ID.
You do realize you need to be registered to vote to be a (potential) voter, right?
In the EU credit reports can't mention bankruptcies over a certain age, by law. Some crimes can't be mentioned after a certain period of time either.
Internet literacy or not, some companies and managers will reject anyone with an excessively negative internet presence because they fear how it could make them look.
Let me ask you something. Is there anything that could be forgiven and forgotten in your eyes? Any kind of mistake. Of you want people to be young and not wrapped in cotton wool, you have to allow them to make mistakes and to fail, and to move on from that without it blighting the rest of their lives.
Forgiven, yes, but forgotten should never happen--I'm not terribly interested in finding myself in the same situation as those aforementioned abuse victims, for example, and I also feel that there are very valid reasons to want to be concerned about an employee who has an excessively negative internet presence because their fear about how it makes them look is not without cause, or have you missed the various people who managed to generate bad publicity and boycotts for their employers because of their unwise choices of what to put on the internet? (Somebody made the news in the US this week for this, and yes, there was an impending boycott because a lot of people were quite reasonably offended by her.)
Not only that, but this is the entire [long string of expletives] point of teaching people to not use their real name on the internet without thinking about their internet presence and undermines why a huge number of people are Not OK with Real Name policies: If I feel a need to be forgotten, I can outright change my screen names and poof, it is done. I certainly don't give potential employers any leads on my private/personal screen names--and in fact feel that it ought to be on the list of things illegal for an employer to require you provide unless essential for performing the job's responsibilities.
The EU's version, at least, comes off as an attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for ensuring the problem doesn't need to exist in the first place, through education and laws limiting what employers may require from employees (potential and current), with an implementation about as open to abuse as a passed-out drunk coed at a frat party who is displaying the fact she isn't wearing panties under her skirt.