Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good
Most people don't. If you're a bigot then we're going to think you're a dick regardless of whether or not your prejudices are overridden -- you'll still find ways to express them.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level. But any social "system" is, necessarily, made up of people and thus the burden of not acting like a dick has to be placed on the people.
The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services
Assuming they live in a place large enough to have multiple wedding cake bakers, and that there's at least one baker who isn't a dick that's free that day (well considering its a wedding cake, probably week+.)
There will always be some snowflake who goes off just on principle when they have other options, but there are completely valid instances when these laws are required in order to give gay couples (or interracial couples or any other historically discriminated group) their opportunity to have a good wedding.
discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector
Which only came into being as an end-around their being forced to free the slaves and similar anti-discrimination policies forced on them by the north that were removing black people as a cheap labor force. Jim Crow laws were enacted for economic rather than discriminatory reasons (they definitely were discriminatory, obviously, but that wasn't their primary reason for existing -- it just made them easier to sell to an already highly-prejudiced American south.)
Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades
The problem is that what you think is just wrong. History tells us (and psychology mostly supports) that humans really, really like dividing the world into "in" groups and "out" groups, with skin color being one of the more obvious ways to do so since its very easy to notice and very hard to hide. Left to our own devices, we tend to get more prejudiced against the unfamiliar rather than less, at least on a societal scale (individual peoples' attitudes will vary greatly of course.)
I mean hell, even with all these laws and decades of slow progress toward acceptance, half of Donald Trump's election campaign was based on discrimination of one sort or another -- Mexicans and Muslims primarily but also hints of Chinese, Japanese, Russians (before half his staff got caught dealing with them) and whatever other group he thought he could safely attack on any given day. And the American people ate it up -- it gave them an excuse to dig up their long-buried prejudices. Which is both sad in its own way, but also blatantly shows that bigotry is still very much alive and not even buried all that deep.
Anti-discrimination laws are still very much needed.
"I need extra contents insurance since I think you may rob me." "I need extra life insurance because I think you may murder me."
Neither of which have anything to do with skin color, outside of racist stereotyping.
"I need extra hardware at the property because I think you are sub-standard as a human and require extra assistance".
I doubt too many consider disabled people as "sub-standard," but that's not the same as recognizing that disabled people (by definition) have limitations that able-bodied people don't.
The reality is that living with a disability or chronic illness can really suck
Nobody (or at least very few people) would deny that.
Living in a society were others discriminate against you for any reason (some of the "legitimate" reasons claimed by the assholes positing in this thread, or otherwise) really sucks.
Trouble is, its not the people that are discriminating in a lot of these legitimate cases. If my house has stairs and you're in a wheelchair, its not really my choice to deny you service -- I flat out can't do so without accepting a large cost on myself to install ramps and chair lifts and whatnot (and may not even be possible at any cost, depending on how far in advance you booked!)
To take another example, if you're blind then its possible, perhaps likely, that you come with an assistance dog. Servicing you now means I have to deal with your dog's feces (which is a small cost to be sure, but its a pretty gross one.) Its nothing against you -- even the best dog in the world has to poop. And I now have to restrict myself from renting in future to anyone who has an allergy to dog fur. Again, its nothing against you but all dogs shed at least a little bit. So in addition to the (small) immediate cost, I have a potentially large opportunity cost against future rentals.
Of course if I'm a dog owner and I deny you based on your having an assistance dog well then I'm just kind of a prick, but lets assume I'm not a dog owner and that these arguments are legitimate. We'll make a similar assumption in the first example that I don't already have the equipment to support a wheelchair installed.
No, I mean worth it at all. As in, tell the EU to go fuck themselves and invest their $9b elsewhere rather than using it to pay the fine and (effectively) taking over a year of $0 profit from the region.
I didn't even add in the fact that revenue will presumably decline when they aren't operating illegally.
Mostly because Netflix amortizes the subscription fee across all of their licenses and across time, whereas movies (especially in theater) and tv shows are generally expected to individually pay for themselves.
Then of course you want to have all ticket/dvd/etc prices to be equal (give or take. All movies are usually equal, while tv show boxes are usually equated by #seasons.)
Combine those two and you end up with all movies/shows being priced to the highest (per-show cost + desired profit) / (per-show #sales) value. Its somewhat more complicated due to the two- or three-phase sales that the studios have to deal with (theater->dvd->tv for movies, tv->dvd for shows) but within each phase, the same basic equation holds -- you just subtract the profit from previous phases from the per-show cost on the next phase.
There will of course be dozens of details hidden in each step of the way, but that should be a pretty good first approximation if you can actually get a legitimate set of values for things like the cost of production (which the studios will have but its well known that the numbers they release are.. questionable. "Hollywood accounting" and all that.)
You don't have a right to demand that someone else sell their products for less
Yes I do. Its an indirect right in the form of "I don't purchase your product if you don't lower the price."
Its their problem if they refuse to compete with someone offering the same product for a lower price (and more convenient to boot.)
This is, very literally, a monopoly complaining that they can't survive when competition enters the market. In any other industry, if you make a $100m investment and can't recoup the costs due to competitive pressure, we wish you good luck with your bankruptcy. But when it comes to the media industries, we instead create laws to eliminate the competition for you.
side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft.
Give it up already. Words change. Your mouse isn't a rodent. Your keyboard has buttons rather than keys and your desktop has nothing to do with a desk, so why aren't you complaining about those word redefinitions?
Piracy and copyright infringement, in 2017, are synonymous phrases (and have been for a few years now) in the context of intellectual property. Just learn to live with it and go spend your time fighting a battle that actually matters.
Fines for companies found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules can reach 10 percent of their global turnover
I hope I'm misreading something here (or the article author was..), but it sounds like Google could in theory be paying more in fines than they actually earned?
Doing some cross-checking it sounds like that $90b "turnover" is their pre-expense revenue. Their profit after expenses is more like $20b, from their own earnings report.
So a $9b fine is almost half of their entire global profits. In fact, according to this site, only around $8b of that profit was generated in the "EMEA" region (Europe, Middle East and Africa -- so that's still more than just the EU itself.)
When you're talking about having to pay out an entire year's profit, plus an additional billion dollars, plus however much cost for additional development needed to avoid future fines, you have to start wondering if its still worth operating in that region at all.
Trouble is, without those laws, discrimination would just return to being rampant and overt (rather than still fairly rampant but at least a bit hidden.) That's why the laws exist in the first place!
I'm not saying that every single law is good or well thought-out, but assuming discrimination is no longer a problem and will continue to go away on its own without regulation is pretty naive. Both history and psychology suggest quite the opposite.
Not really. In a completely free market -- free even to the point of somehow not involving human biases and discrimination -- you get a basic question of "is a disabled person willing and able to pay me enough to justify supporting their disability?" And that's assuming there's enough competition to cover all consumers (ie: the bnb are deciding between a disabled person vs an empty room rather than between a disabled person and an able-bodied person.)
For example if you want to service a blind person, you have to be willing to deal with the fact that they'll probably come with an assistance dog -- so somewhere the dog can defecate, willingness to accept leftover shed fur, etc. Servicing someone with mobility issues involves installing ramps and so on.
Basically, most of the regulations exist to remove these types of discrimination, because left to their own devices very few businesses would be interested in putting in the investment needed to service disabled people.
That's totally different from refusing service to black people, for example, where the only reason for rejection is racism.
Unless there's something TFA is glossing over, it sounds like fairly standard adware.. they even state that it safely goes away when you uninstall the offending container software, making it actually less obnoxious than Banzai Buddy and his friends from a decade ago.
And I suppose you plan to what.. pay God off to save the East coast when the sea levels rise high enough to drown Florida and half of New York?
Like it or not, America is on this planet. Looking out for the planet is looking out for yourself. But of course America isn't interested in protecting its citizens. Its interested in protecting its profits. Sometimes, maybe even often, those two goals align, but not always and definitely not in this case. Well, assuming you're concerned about future American citizens at least. If all you care about is yourself and to hell with your own grandchildren then I guess you may as well enjoy the Earth while it lasts.
I don't know where you work, what your commute is like, and what gas prices are on your area, but in many (most?) places, monthly transit passes are on the order of $50. If you have a remotely long commute, its easy to burn through $50 in a lot of places.
The biggest problem with mass transit is convenience. You're on their schedule (and often they aren't, so you have to plan a bus or two in advance and waste 15-30 minutes on the other end just in case today is the day the bus is 15 minutes late.) You have to deal with other people -- frequently from the lower end of society to boot. It usually takes a lot longer due to the frequent stops, and then you've got to walk to and from a bus stop on either end. All of that adds up to a long, unpleasant commute even when compared to idling in traffic.
Of course some cities have worked to improve this. HOV lanes (when not allowed to fall too far into abuse by asshats) help minimize the amount of time you're on the bus. LRT and other trains are generally much faster and often better at being on time than buses. And simply having enough buses to meet demand (and some backups available at the drop of a hat for concerts or other events that cause heavier-than-usual traffic.) All of that helps significantly.
And you see it. In places with shitty transit systems, the only people you generally see on the bus are those that can't afford cars and have no other choice. In a good transit system, you get quite a lot of riders from across the spectrum (well usually not the super wealthy.. if you can afford a private driver then to hell with the bus eh!) Consider the mass of businessfolk that use Tokyo's train system on a daily basis, for example.
I love how often we see "something will be announced soon!" announcements these days. I mean I guess it gives people who are powerful enough to get a quick line to POTUS a last-second chance to change his mind but in the vast majority of cases where that doesn't happen, it just seems kind of redundant and weird. At least to me.
Even if it does mean endorsement, this is a pretty terrible ruling. Its effectively making it punishable to be an asshole, which in itself is often defined not so much by your actions but by those who are interpreting your actions.
Depending on how they balance free speech against the potential for incitement of hate and/or violence, there could be an argument for going after whoever originally made the posts.. but fining a guy just for agreeing with them is a whole other level of slippery slope, even before you start into the ambiguities of what a "like" means. Oh and of course these posts (apparently) weren't attempting to incite violence -- they were defamation.
So you do something I don't like. I call you a poopoohead on FB, and CowboyNeal likes my post.. so they fine CowboyNeal? Lets just hope that there's more to this case than T(rather detail-limited)FA implies to make it not as stupid and scary as it sounds.
Problem is, getting your news from "official" sources like Fox or CNN these days is, under your metaphor, more like just eating shit straight from the toilet and calling it food.
Its true that John Oliver and similar "news"-centric comedians tend to be moderate erring to the left, so I'm sure they come off as kind of grating if you're a hard right-winger but that's on you and you're free to go back to getting your "news" from Breitbart rants and Fox and Friends like the president does.
Depending on the resolution of the camera and the training of the software's neural nets, the facial recognition can actually do much better than a person. There's a lot of stuff our brains just don't focus on, and there's a lot of detail that's too small for our eyes to really notice from any sort of distance, but a good enough camera will capture.
Of course also entirely possible for someone who knows enough about any particular software and how its been trained to trick it, as you can find plenty of demonstrations of if you google around a bit. And its also entirely possible for two people to really look similar enough that the software can't tell. And finally there will always be those edge cases that the software just wasn't trained on well enough and will confuse it.
But FR isn't really a joke anymore. We tend to think that people are 100% accurate at recognizing faces (police lineups and the such are based on this assumption) but the data shows that its really not true -- we're actually fairly bad at it.
But we have a few tricks to compensate: First, we only really pay attention to the faces of people we know. If we look at a picture with 10 people in it, we see John and Sarah whom we know, and 8 "others" that we don't know and don't care about. That's perfectly fine for our day to day activities where we mostly tend to ignore anyone we're not directly interacting with, but it doesn't do so great when you need to match a face against "one of 100,000 people."
The other trick we use is extra contextual information. If we know for sure that Sarah's at home and we go to the mall, any time we see someone who looks at Sarah, we can immediately shut it out because we know its not her (and of course if she changed her mind and DID come to the mall, this can lead us to not immediately recognizing someone we should be able to.) We can also use context such as knowing what kind of wardrobe our friends wear, the hairstyles they tend to prefer, etc. Our brains put all of this together to come up with a whole picture that just a headshot doesn't give us.
And of course if all else fails, we're really good at convincing ourselves its not our fault -- the light hit the person in a strange way or oh my goodness John has that exact same t-shirt or any of a dozen other excuses for why we just flat out got it wrong (we tend to do this for all failures of mental process of course, not just facial recognition -- our brains are wired to not admit our own faults.)
Anyway that turned out a lot more long-winded than I'd planned..
Which is exactly the point. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a movie buff. A lot of people just go "what's in the theater today?", knock out anything they've already seen and look for a quick ranking of the stuff that's left. They don't want to spend 3 hours scanning through every pissant's comment (or even real critic comments) to decide whether or not they should watch a 90 minute movie.
I tried breading my CO2 and I just got sourdough.. Tasty, but it didn't kill me.
lack of rain
What lack of rain? The hotter the planet is, the more water will evaporate making more clouds which in turn means more rain. Though it will get a bit more acidic for the same reason as the oceans. In fact this is the biggest lead-up to the "runaway" version of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and as temperatures continue to rise, at some point we'll cross a threshold where enough water is evaporating that it generates a positive feedback loop and global warming becomes essentially unstoppable. Warming -> more evaporation -> more warming -> even more evaporation -> etc.
There will eventually be a new (much higher) equilibrium point of course where the air is so saturated with moisture that rainfall matches evaporation and the cycle will plateau, but by the time the world hits that point, life will basically be reset to plants and insects and maybe a few lucky animals, similar to the Great Dying.
While true, we're not expecting another peak oil scare for a while yet. With the introduction of fracking and other technological advances on the production side, and clean energy combined with ever more efficient uses for energy on the consumption side, we're kind of currently drowning in oil (and natural gas.)
So you're not wrong per se.. we will hit another peak oil crisis eventually. We'll even hit the "real" peak oil at some point, where no matter how much we improve technology we just can't suck anymore out of the ground. But its not an immediate concern right now -- we're looking at probably a couple of decades of supply to burn through before we need to start panicking again.
In the meantime, regardless of all the deniers and Trump's stupidity, climate change concerns and environmental protection is our bigger incentive for reducing fossil fuel usage, at least outside of the US.
This can actually make sense. Most oil production in the US is in the south/southeast states. Getting that oil to say, Oregon requires moving it across more than half the country. Whereas if Oregon gets their oil from Canada, most of the production up here is in Alberta -- ie: on the west side of the continent.
So it may well be cost effective in some situations to export eastern-produced oil out to wherever across the Atlantic while importing oil for the west (especially the northwest) from Canada, simply to lower the transport costs for any particular barrel.
And then of course you have the refined vs not refined discussion. You could be exporting unrefined oil and turning around and re-importing the same oil after refining (or the other way around.. I don't know the actual numbers.) In absolutes that of course is a net-zero (give or take some relatively negligible production and transport losses) but that's where the ability to lie with statistics comes into play: If you only count the imports and ignore the exports, it looks like you're using a lot more oil than you actually are because "using" it in that case is partially a double counting.
"Benign" as in overthrowing many governments in South America and elsewhere in order to install puppets more favorable to US interests.. continual warmongering in the Middle East to ensure ongoing oil supplies.. decades of sanctions against Cuba for reasons that haven't mattered since the 70s and so on.
Not that the US hasn't also done plenty of good in the world as well of course, and nor am I claiming that China will be a good master either, but calling the US' stewardship benign is hardly accurate.
China is certainly doing great, and I think everyone (outside of the US) expects them to overtake the US as the world leader at some point during this century -- especially if the US continues on its isolationist path.
But China has the significant downside of being not particularly free, which imposes a ceiling on how far they can take go because certain ideas can just always be axed if the government chooses, no matter how good the idea is.
India on the other hand. India is (comparatively) free. They have a similar population size to China and is projected to exceed China in the coming decades. India is definitely going to be a contender on the world stage in the next 50-100 years.
So I suspect that, if things continue down the current path and barring anything super game changing like nuclear war or China deciding to reverse all of its open door policies unilaterally or whatever, we'll see China overtake the US in the next few decades and then India overtake China after they hit their plateau.
That's a lot of pretty big "ifs" of course and a century is an extremely long time to talk about "continue down the current path." It only takes one major political shift in any of those countries (or other potential powers like Russia, or even Africa if enough of the countries can get their collective shit together) to completely throw the whole scenario off the tracks. But that's what its looking like given the current trends.
Its not. Its aimed at hoping to convince the distributors that they'll earn enough money to forego the potential drop in theater ticket sales.
Its the typical media company mindset of pricing things to their desires rather than to yours. They just take the (already arbitrary) value of a theater ticket, add on the profit they want to make, add on the amount they have to pay off to the various distribution and production companies, round it up to something "nice" and that's the ticket price, regardless of whether it makes sense for anyone to actually pay that price.
As others have said, there's probably a certain segment of the population for whom $50 seems reasonable -- people who share a house (family, roommates, otherwise) and enough people want to watch that movie such that it adds up to the price of going to the theater.. people who have enough money to just not care and be happy that they don't have to deal with the public.. people who can't get to a theater for one reason or another (illness, really young children, etc.)
But for the vast majority of people, if you go to a movie you usually are going with friends who often don't live with you and sure you could all squeeze together on someone's couch but if you're going to that much trouble then why not just go to the theater? Especially when the virtual ticket price is the equivalent of 3-4 real tickets. And you're not having to annoy (or share with) other people in your house that weren't part of the original plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Thanks, I knew that didn't look right but close enough that I didn't bother double-checking ;).
Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good
Most people don't. If you're a bigot then we're going to think you're a dick regardless of whether or not your prejudices are overridden -- you'll still find ways to express them.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level. But any social "system" is, necessarily, made up of people and thus the burden of not acting like a dick has to be placed on the people.
The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services
Assuming they live in a place large enough to have multiple wedding cake bakers, and that there's at least one baker who isn't a dick that's free that day (well considering its a wedding cake, probably week+.)
There will always be some snowflake who goes off just on principle when they have other options, but there are completely valid instances when these laws are required in order to give gay couples (or interracial couples or any other historically discriminated group) their opportunity to have a good wedding.
discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector
Which only came into being as an end-around their being forced to free the slaves and similar anti-discrimination policies forced on them by the north that were removing black people as a cheap labor force. Jim Crow laws were enacted for economic rather than discriminatory reasons (they definitely were discriminatory, obviously, but that wasn't their primary reason for existing -- it just made them easier to sell to an already highly-prejudiced American south.)
Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades
The problem is that what you think is just wrong. History tells us (and psychology mostly supports) that humans really, really like dividing the world into "in" groups and "out" groups, with skin color being one of the more obvious ways to do so since its very easy to notice and very hard to hide. Left to our own devices, we tend to get more prejudiced against the unfamiliar rather than less, at least on a societal scale (individual peoples' attitudes will vary greatly of course.)
I mean hell, even with all these laws and decades of slow progress toward acceptance, half of Donald Trump's election campaign was based on discrimination of one sort or another -- Mexicans and Muslims primarily but also hints of Chinese, Japanese, Russians (before half his staff got caught dealing with them) and whatever other group he thought he could safely attack on any given day. And the American people ate it up -- it gave them an excuse to dig up their long-buried prejudices. Which is both sad in its own way, but also blatantly shows that bigotry is still very much alive and not even buried all that deep.
Anti-discrimination laws are still very much needed.
"I need extra contents insurance since I think you may rob me."
"I need extra life insurance because I think you may murder me."
Neither of which have anything to do with skin color, outside of racist stereotyping.
"I need extra hardware at the property because I think you are sub-standard as a human and require extra assistance".
I doubt too many consider disabled people as "sub-standard," but that's not the same as recognizing that disabled people (by definition) have limitations that able-bodied people don't.
The reality is that living with a disability or chronic illness can really suck
Nobody (or at least very few people) would deny that.
Living in a society were others discriminate against you for any reason (some of the "legitimate" reasons claimed by the assholes positing in this thread, or otherwise) really sucks.
Trouble is, its not the people that are discriminating in a lot of these legitimate cases. If my house has stairs and you're in a wheelchair, its not really my choice to deny you service -- I flat out can't do so without accepting a large cost on myself to install ramps and chair lifts and whatnot (and may not even be possible at any cost, depending on how far in advance you booked!)
To take another example, if you're blind then its possible, perhaps likely, that you come with an assistance dog. Servicing you now means I have to deal with your dog's feces (which is a small cost to be sure, but its a pretty gross one.) Its nothing against you -- even the best dog in the world has to poop. And I now have to restrict myself from renting in future to anyone who has an allergy to dog fur. Again, its nothing against you but all dogs shed at least a little bit. So in addition to the (small) immediate cost, I have a potentially large opportunity cost against future rentals.
Of course if I'm a dog owner and I deny you based on your having an assistance dog well then I'm just kind of a prick, but lets assume I'm not a dog owner and that these arguments are legitimate. We'll make a similar assumption in the first example that I don't already have the equipment to support a wheelchair installed.
No, I mean worth it at all. As in, tell the EU to go fuck themselves and invest their $9b elsewhere rather than using it to pay the fine and (effectively) taking over a year of $0 profit from the region.
I didn't even add in the fact that revenue will presumably decline when they aren't operating illegally.
Mostly because Netflix amortizes the subscription fee across all of their licenses and across time, whereas movies (especially in theater) and tv shows are generally expected to individually pay for themselves.
Then of course you want to have all ticket/dvd/etc prices to be equal (give or take. All movies are usually equal, while tv show boxes are usually equated by #seasons.)
Combine those two and you end up with all
movies/shows being priced to the highest (per-show cost + desired profit) / (per-show #sales) value. Its somewhat more complicated due to the two- or three-phase sales that the studios have to deal with (theater->dvd->tv for movies, tv->dvd for shows) but within each phase, the same basic equation holds -- you just subtract the profit from previous phases from the per-show cost on the next phase.
There will of course be dozens of details hidden in each step of the way, but that should be a pretty good first approximation if you can actually get a legitimate set of values for things like the cost of production (which the studios will have but its well known that the numbers they release are.. questionable. "Hollywood accounting" and all that.)
Yeah. They rebooted the series in the early aughts.
You don't have a right to demand that someone else sell their products for less
Yes I do. Its an indirect right in the form of "I don't purchase your product if you don't lower the price."
Its their problem if they refuse to compete with someone offering the same product for a lower price (and more convenient to boot.)
This is, very literally, a monopoly complaining that they can't survive when competition enters the market. In any other industry, if you make a $100m investment and can't recoup the costs due to competitive pressure, we wish you good luck with your bankruptcy. But when it comes to the media industries, we instead create laws to eliminate the competition for you.
side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft.
Give it up already. Words change. Your mouse isn't a rodent. Your keyboard has buttons rather than keys and your desktop has nothing to do with a desk, so why aren't you complaining about those word redefinitions?
Piracy and copyright infringement, in 2017, are synonymous phrases (and have been for a few years now) in the context of intellectual property. Just learn to live with it and go spend your time fighting a battle that actually matters.
Fines for companies found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules can reach 10 percent of their global turnover
I hope I'm misreading something here (or the article author was..), but it sounds like Google could in theory be paying more in fines than they actually earned?
Doing some cross-checking it sounds like that $90b "turnover" is their pre-expense revenue. Their profit after expenses is more like $20b, from their own earnings report.
So a $9b fine is almost half of their entire global profits. In fact, according to this site, only around $8b of that profit was generated in the "EMEA" region (Europe, Middle East and Africa -- so that's still more than just the EU itself.)
When you're talking about having to pay out an entire year's profit, plus an additional billion dollars, plus however much cost for additional development needed to avoid future fines, you have to start wondering if its still worth operating in that region at all.
Trouble is, without those laws, discrimination would just return to being rampant and overt (rather than still fairly rampant but at least a bit hidden.) That's why the laws exist in the first place!
I'm not saying that every single law is good or well thought-out, but assuming discrimination is no longer a problem and will continue to go away on its own without regulation is pretty naive. Both history and psychology suggest quite the opposite.
Not really. In a completely free market -- free even to the point of somehow not involving human biases and discrimination -- you get a basic question of "is a disabled person willing and able to pay me enough to justify supporting their disability?" And that's assuming there's enough competition to cover all consumers (ie: the bnb are deciding between a disabled person vs an empty room rather than between a disabled person and an able-bodied person.)
For example if you want to service a blind person, you have to be willing to deal with the fact that they'll probably come with an assistance dog -- so somewhere the dog can defecate, willingness to accept leftover shed fur, etc. Servicing someone with mobility issues involves installing ramps and so on.
Basically, most of the regulations exist to remove these types of discrimination, because left to their own devices very few businesses would be interested in putting in the investment needed to service disabled people.
That's totally different from refusing service to black people, for example, where the only reason for rejection is racism.
Sounds like its just Banzai Buddy 2.0..
Unless there's something TFA is glossing over, it sounds like fairly standard adware.. they even state that it safely goes away when you uninstall the offending container software, making it actually less obnoxious than Banzai Buddy and his friends from a decade ago.
And I suppose you plan to what.. pay God off to save the East coast when the sea levels rise high enough to drown Florida and half of New York?
Like it or not, America is on this planet. Looking out for the planet is looking out for yourself. But of course America isn't interested in protecting its citizens. Its interested in protecting its profits. Sometimes, maybe even often, those two goals align, but not always and definitely not in this case. Well, assuming you're concerned about future American citizens at least. If all you care about is yourself and to hell with your own grandchildren then I guess you may as well enjoy the Earth while it lasts.
I don't know where you work, what your commute is like, and what gas prices are on your area, but in many (most?) places, monthly transit passes are on the order of $50. If you have a remotely long commute, its easy to burn through $50 in a lot of places.
The biggest problem with mass transit is convenience. You're on their schedule (and often they aren't, so you have to plan a bus or two in advance and waste 15-30 minutes on the other end just in case today is the day the bus is 15 minutes late.) You have to deal with other people -- frequently from the lower end of society to boot. It usually takes a lot longer due to the frequent stops, and then you've got to walk to and from a bus stop on either end. All of that adds up to a long, unpleasant commute even when compared to idling in traffic.
Of course some cities have worked to improve this. HOV lanes (when not allowed to fall too far into abuse by asshats) help minimize the amount of time you're on the bus. LRT and other trains are generally much faster and often better at being on time than buses. And simply having enough buses to meet demand (and some backups available at the drop of a hat for concerts or other events that cause heavier-than-usual traffic.) All of that helps significantly.
And you see it. In places with shitty transit systems, the only people you generally see on the bus are those that can't afford cars and have no other choice. In a good transit system, you get quite a lot of riders from across the spectrum (well usually not the super wealthy.. if you can afford a private driver then to hell with the bus eh!) Consider the mass of businessfolk that use Tokyo's train system on a daily basis, for example.
I love how often we see "something will be announced soon!" announcements these days. I mean I guess it gives people who are powerful enough to get a quick line to POTUS a last-second chance to change his mind but in the vast majority of cases where that doesn't happen, it just seems kind of redundant and weird. At least to me.
Even if it does mean endorsement, this is a pretty terrible ruling. Its effectively making it punishable to be an asshole, which in itself is often defined not so much by your actions but by those who are interpreting your actions.
Depending on how they balance free speech against the potential for incitement of hate and/or violence, there could be an argument for going after whoever originally made the posts.. but fining a guy just for agreeing with them is a whole other level of slippery slope, even before you start into the ambiguities of what a "like" means. Oh and of course these posts (apparently) weren't attempting to incite violence -- they were defamation.
So you do something I don't like. I call you a poopoohead on FB, and CowboyNeal likes my post.. so they fine CowboyNeal? Lets just hope that there's more to this case than T(rather detail-limited)FA implies to make it not as stupid and scary as it sounds.
Problem is, getting your news from "official" sources like Fox or CNN these days is, under your metaphor, more like just eating shit straight from the toilet and calling it food.
Its true that John Oliver and similar "news"-centric comedians tend to be moderate erring to the left, so I'm sure they come off as kind of grating if you're a hard right-winger but that's on you and you're free to go back to getting your "news" from Breitbart rants and Fox and Friends like the president does.
Depending on the resolution of the camera and the training of the software's neural nets, the facial recognition can actually do much better than a person. There's a lot of stuff our brains just don't focus on, and there's a lot of detail that's too small for our eyes to really notice from any sort of distance, but a good enough camera will capture.
Of course also entirely possible for someone who knows enough about any particular software and how its been trained to trick it, as you can find plenty of demonstrations of if you google around a bit. And its also entirely possible for two people to really look similar enough that the software can't tell. And finally there will always be those edge cases that the software just wasn't trained on well enough and will confuse it.
But FR isn't really a joke anymore. We tend to think that people are 100% accurate at recognizing faces (police lineups and the such are based on this assumption) but the data shows that its really not true -- we're actually fairly bad at it.
But we have a few tricks to compensate: First, we only really pay attention to the faces of people we know. If we look at a picture with 10 people in it, we see John and Sarah whom we know, and 8 "others" that we don't know and don't care about. That's perfectly fine for our day to day activities where we mostly tend to ignore anyone we're not directly interacting with, but it doesn't do so great when you need to match a face against "one of 100,000 people."
The other trick we use is extra contextual information. If we know for sure that Sarah's at home and we go to the mall, any time we see someone who looks at Sarah, we can immediately shut it out because we know its not her (and of course if she changed her mind and DID come to the mall, this can lead us to not immediately recognizing someone we should be able to.) We can also use context such as knowing what kind of wardrobe our friends wear, the hairstyles they tend to prefer, etc. Our brains put all of this together to come up with a whole picture that just a headshot doesn't give us.
And of course if all else fails, we're really good at convincing ourselves its not our fault -- the light hit the person in a strange way or oh my goodness John has that exact same t-shirt or any of a dozen other excuses for why we just flat out got it wrong (we tend to do this for all failures of mental process of course, not just facial recognition -- our brains are wired to not admit our own faults.)
Anyway that turned out a lot more long-winded than I'd planned..
Which is exactly the point. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a movie buff. A lot of people just go "what's in the theater today?", knock out anything they've already seen and look for a quick ranking of the stuff that's left. They don't want to spend 3 hours scanning through every pissant's comment (or even real critic comments) to decide whether or not they should watch a 90 minute movie.
I tried breading my CO2 and I just got sourdough.. Tasty, but it didn't kill me.
lack of rain
What lack of rain? The hotter the planet is, the more water will evaporate making more clouds which in turn means more rain. Though it will get a bit more acidic for the same reason as the oceans. In fact this is the biggest lead-up to the "runaway" version of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and as temperatures continue to rise, at some point we'll cross a threshold where enough water is evaporating that it generates a positive feedback loop and global warming becomes essentially unstoppable. Warming -> more evaporation -> more warming -> even more evaporation -> etc.
There will eventually be a new (much higher) equilibrium point of course where the air is so saturated with moisture that rainfall matches evaporation and the cycle will plateau, but by the time the world hits that point, life will basically be reset to plants and insects and maybe a few lucky animals, similar to the Great Dying.
While true, we're not expecting another peak oil scare for a while yet. With the introduction of fracking and other technological advances on the production side, and clean energy combined with ever more efficient uses for energy on the consumption side, we're kind of currently drowning in oil (and natural gas.)
So you're not wrong per se.. we will hit another peak oil crisis eventually. We'll even hit the "real" peak oil at some point, where no matter how much we improve technology we just can't suck anymore out of the ground. But its not an immediate concern right now -- we're looking at probably a couple of decades of supply to burn through before we need to start panicking again.
In the meantime, regardless of all the deniers and Trump's stupidity, climate change concerns and environmental protection is our bigger incentive for reducing fossil fuel usage, at least outside of the US.
This can actually make sense. Most oil production in the US is in the south/southeast states. Getting that oil to say, Oregon requires moving it across more than half the country. Whereas if Oregon gets their oil from Canada, most of the production up here is in Alberta -- ie: on the west side of the continent.
So it may well be cost effective in some situations to export eastern-produced oil out to wherever across the Atlantic while importing oil for the west (especially the northwest) from Canada, simply to lower the transport costs for any particular barrel.
And then of course you have the refined vs not refined discussion. You could be exporting unrefined oil and turning around and re-importing the same oil after refining (or the other way around.. I don't know the actual numbers.) In absolutes that of course is a net-zero (give or take some relatively negligible production and transport losses) but that's where the ability to lie with statistics comes into play: If you only count the imports and ignore the exports, it looks like you're using a lot more oil than you actually are because "using" it in that case is partially a double counting.
"Benign" as in overthrowing many governments in South America and elsewhere in order to install puppets more favorable to US interests.. continual warmongering in the Middle East to ensure ongoing oil supplies.. decades of sanctions against Cuba for reasons that haven't mattered since the 70s and so on.
Not that the US hasn't also done plenty of good in the world as well of course, and nor am I claiming that China will be a good master either, but calling the US' stewardship benign is hardly accurate.
China is certainly doing great, and I think everyone (outside of the US) expects them to overtake the US as the world leader at some point during this century -- especially if the US continues on its isolationist path.
But China has the significant downside of being not particularly free, which imposes a ceiling on how far they can take go because certain ideas can just always be axed if the government chooses, no matter how good the idea is.
India on the other hand. India is (comparatively) free. They have a similar population size to China and is projected to exceed China in the coming decades. India is definitely going to be a contender on the world stage in the next 50-100 years.
So I suspect that, if things continue down the current path and barring anything super game changing like nuclear war or China deciding to reverse all of its open door policies unilaterally or whatever, we'll see China overtake the US in the next few decades and then India overtake China after they hit their plateau.
That's a lot of pretty big "ifs" of course and a century is an extremely long time to talk about "continue down the current path." It only takes one major political shift in any of those countries (or other potential powers like Russia, or even Africa if enough of the countries can get their collective shit together) to completely throw the whole scenario off the tracks. But that's what its looking like given the current trends.
Its not. Its aimed at hoping to convince the distributors that they'll earn enough money to forego the potential drop in theater ticket sales.
Its the typical media company mindset of pricing things to their desires rather than to yours. They just take the (already arbitrary) value of a theater ticket, add on the profit they want to make, add on the amount they have to pay off to the various distribution and production companies, round it up to something "nice" and that's the ticket price, regardless of whether it makes sense for anyone to actually pay that price.
As others have said, there's probably a certain segment of the population for whom $50 seems reasonable -- people who share a house (family, roommates, otherwise) and enough people want to watch that movie such that it adds up to the price of going to the theater.. people who have enough money to just not care and be happy that they don't have to deal with the public.. people who can't get to a theater for one reason or another (illness, really young children, etc.)
But for the vast majority of people, if you go to a movie you usually are going with friends who often don't live with you and sure you could all squeeze together on someone's couch but if you're going to that much trouble then why not just go to the theater? Especially when the virtual ticket price is the equivalent of 3-4 real tickets. And you're not having to annoy (or share with) other people in your house that weren't part of the original plan.