Unfortunately all the rhetoric and examples in the world don't make taxation be theft (any more than my example makes taxation be actually equivalent to getting an oil change.)
When a monarch demands gold from his peasants just to enrich himself and doesn't give the peasants anything in return, that's still taxation, and the peasantry don't get to say "hey you didn't give me anything in return for that" because that's not how taxes work.
Depends entirely on your definition of "anything in return." Even brutal monarchs need to fund military and whatnot (again you can argue whether your taxes are paying for things you personally think are important.)
That said (and I admit its stretching definition a bit since its hard to justify the king's new gold-plated carriage as being useful to the people,) there is also a major difference between a greedy monarch and a democratically elected representative -- the peasantry don't have any say in choosing their monarch, nor can they "fire" him short of regicide if they think he's doing a shit job of representing them, whereas an elected representative can be voted out (sometimes not soon enough, but I'll try to stay on topic!)
you'll note it's formally identical to theft
No it isn't, mostly because that "or else" clause has enormously different connotations when its the IRS asking for your taxes vs a mugger asking for your wallet.
Here, from dictionary.com's entry for "theft:"
the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another
Emphasis mine. And pretty important. Taxation isn't considered "wrongful" (well, outside of libertarian rhetoric) and therefore by definition, isn't theft regardless of anything else -- even when a greedy monarch uses the money for entirely self-serving purposes.
Of course it helps that the government (monarch or otherwise) who collects the taxes also defines "wrongful." That's part of why the US was founded with strong checks and balances against too much concentration of power -- they knew how England operated and didn't really like the prospect. Hell excessive taxation was no small part of why the US broke ties with the mother country in the first place.
What do you consider "vital information?" Most people probably don't have a text file with their SSN and credit card info just sitting there on the phone's desktop.
But location history? You don't really get to control that. Browsing history? Better remember to clear it every single time you surf the web (can you trust that its actually gone?) Contacts in your dialer.. the type of apps you use.. etc etc etc.
There's boatloads of information that your device knows about you that you didn't have to directly type in. Simple day to day usage generates plenty of information with only assumed consent, and much of that is necessary for it to perform the tasks you want it to do -- you can't really use a navigation app if you disable location tracking for example.
For the super paranoid, you're welcome to get rid of your phone and your home internet connection and try to keep a car from 1982 on the road, cancel your credit cards (and move to a new place that you can somehow rent on a cash-only basis with no names exchanged and leave no forwarding address to ensure they don't have you still on file) and so on and so on to ensure that when they come for you, they'll have to do it the old fashioned way.
For the other 99.9999% of us, we don't really have a choice. Technology is what it is and unfortunately personal privacy hasn't been much of a design consideration (yet.. hopefully..)
And to really piss you off, doing all of that super paranoid stuff I mentioned above? That gets you flagged because they assume nobody in their right mind would go to that much trouble to avoid modern conveniences and well.. they'd probably be right.
Its a bit of an unjustified leap to go from "super weird" to "dangerous" but when we're talking about tourists entering the US these days where the government has basically flat out stated that non-US citizens have less rights than your average pet and even US citizens that dare to leave the country should be viewed with extreme caution when they return.
The "all" in "All men are created equal" has been given a very narrow and constantly shrinking interpretation in recent years.
No it can't.. at least not beyond the most mundane interpretations such as "the new law could be typed up in a word processor."
Technology needs to be implemented by somebody, and if it runs afoul of laws, the cops and lawyers will simply go after the implementer. Sure that may be impractical if you write your own encrypted messenger client that you and your 3 friends use but when we're talking companies on the scale of Google and Apple and Microsoft, their choice to run afoul of the law could affect millions of users.
Think about the iPhone hack. One judge making one good decision is the only difference between Apple protecting its customers and Apple being forced to (effectively) open the flood gates for iPhone decryption -- which almost certainly would have been used as precedent if the next case featured an Android or Blackberry or whatever.
That said, using encrypted communications is not yet illegal as far as I know, or at least not in the US. I'm pretty sure master keys or similar aren't even required yet. So there's currently nothing to fix in the sense that these companies could freely implement such technologies and just choose not to.
People give a shit about privacy. They just don't understand it and (more importantly) how and when its being compromised.
The biggest issue is a disconnect between where privacy is compromised and where its expected to be compromised. If I post a picture of my dog to Facebook and share it with my friends, I expect that only my friends will be able to see it. That's seems like a pretty reasonable assumption.
However, because its on FB's server, I no longer have control over the picture and that's the tricky part that many people fail to understand because there isn't really a real-world equivalent to hosting a picture on someone else' server -- at least not without invoking some heavily constructed scenarios that would be just as hard for an average person to understand as the actual problem.
At the end of the day, ignorance is ignorance whether its intentional or not, but in the unintentional case we have at least the possibility of informing people and reducing the amount of ignorance toward the issue. Unfortunately we've been pretty unsuccessful in that context as well since for the most part, all of this privacy invasion has been fairly subtle and unintrusive to the average person so its hard to convince them that there is even a problem that they're ignorant of, never mind correcting that ignorance.
Yes, but sometimes all a person has to do to help improve things is be supportive of the people with the time, energy and ability to do something more direct and show them that their fight is worthwhile.
Sometimes just asserting that you care is enough, and its certainly better than stewing quietly and keeping your mouth shut.
Imagine a world like this, where freedom was valued but violence was simply not tolerated. It is not entirely appalling.
Not entirely appalling, but unfortunately its pretty unrealistic, mostly because nobody will be willing to give wide liberties on many subjects, especially sexuality. Even if the all discriminatory laws are wiped and we somehow come to consensus on the exactly lines for things like what constitutes rape and whatnot so that everyone knows exactly the rules to follow by law.. unfortunately that does nothing for the social issues and those can be just as freedom-inhibiting as legal issues.
We already see that with for example employment: Your employer may not be legally allowed to fire you when he finds out you're gay, but suddenly every tiny mishap that would be overlooked for a "normal" person becomes potential grounds to fire you and the onus is on you to spend the time and money (at least up front) trying to convince the court that you were actually fired for your sexuality rather than because you forgot to submit your TPS report on Tuesday.
However, while things like houses, cars, and tuition have gone up, virtually everything that we don't need capital loans for has gone down
I'm pretty sure cars have stayed relatively flat or maybe even gone down a bit when adjusted for inflation.
A quick Google for "car price 1955" pops a quick box saying average of $1,900, which is around $17,000 in today's money. Which is about right for a moderately-featured sedan, give or take.
A house on the other hand averaged about $11,000 in 1955 (from that same quick box.) Which is around $90,000 today. So a somewhat under half of 2016's average US price $213,000.
Tuition is somewhat harder to guess at, and I won't try, due to the relative difference in how we treat post secondary education (a luxury in 1955, a near-necessity in 2017 if you plan on getting a decent job.)
Looked it up and found the discrepancy: Apparently in the US, the word scholarship does not mean what everyone else think it means. I was using it for what I guess you call "grants."
As for (US) scholarships.. that's great! So the students are only under massive debt loads for 10 years instead of 15. I mean that's a pretty good improvement, but we're still not exactly approaching free ride territory either.
why not have high school diploma accommodate what is needed for the average citizen to be competitive in the work force?
This question has been floated around seriously for a while now. The only real response so far is "because taxes." But aside from that, as you pointed out yourself, not everybody can or should go through secondary education so calling it part of high school may not be the most optimal plan. But its also not optimal for it to be available only to the super rich and the 1% lucky enough to win a scholarship -- it should be available to but not required for everybody.
That said, I don't necessarily think it needs to be 100% free for everybody (though that would be nice.) But the current system of immediately dropping the majority of students into a decade or more of overwhelming debt isn't really cool either, especially during a time when inflation is outpacing wages by leaps and bounds year after year.
What does a college provide that is necessary to participate?
Primarily at this point, a piece of paper saying that you put in your time. You could argue that this is stupid (and I would agree with you,) but unfortunately it seems to be the way things are.
why should taxpayers subsidized gender studies degrees or other useless drivel?
Why should anybody? Just shut those departments down! Research has never improved anybody's quality of life except in the cases where there's a direct and immediate guarantee of financial return!
For that matter, why should colleges have football and basketball teams? Those are even more useless to intellectual pursuits than women's studies! Let the major sports teams pay for and run their own feeder leagues!
But aside from you arbitrarily deciding who is useful to society, the main point of getting a college degree is proving you can get a degree more than specifically which one. Certainly some are more industry-focused than others but for the most part, people are looking at your degree more to learn about you as a person rather than to learn about your (mostly irrelevant) class load. I mean hell I took computer science and I work as a programmer (so about as direct a correspondence between degree and occupation as you can get,) and I bet I could count on one hand the times I've used much past the first year coursework in any real world application. But I still need that piece of paper listed on my resume in order to apply for pretty much any job -- especially in the age of first-round automated resume filtering.
Identify what makes a college degree necessary
Frankly I have no idea. But it IS necessary for most moderate-to-high level jobs and many lower-level jobs, particularly in the STEM fields.
Keep in mind there was a time, less than a century ago, when people were asking these exact same questions about high school -- primary school is good enough right? Who the hell will ever need trigonometry or Shakespeare? A grade 6-7 reading level and the four basic math operations should be sufficient for anybody, right?
It means there's a lot of people who don't know how to live in hotter conditions. Take anyone from the mountains of Colorado and throw them in summertime Arizona and they'll likely have problems. But that doesn't mean people can't live in Arizona -- they just have to adapt a bit. Sure some people may not be able to do that, but on a global scale its barely a rounding error.
Trees and plants on the other hand don't have the ability to adapt (at least not that fast.) They can't just pack up and move 100 miles north when they get sick of the heat. They have to wait thousands or even millions of years for evolution to adapt them and well.. they don't got that kind of time.
And well lets just say a few heat deaths is going to look like paradise when we're facing a year without say.. grain.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production
This is your big fallacy. Consumption is hardly a "trivial" consequence of production. You're right (sort of..) that production stimulates the economy.. at least in so much as we measure GDP by dollars worth of goods produced (you could argue that that's a poor measurement but I won't right now.)
But consumption stimulates production. Nobody produces anything that someone else doesn't want to consume (or at least they don't produce it for long..) A working economy has to be (close to) a balanced equation: Too much production and things get left out to rot (draining value from the economy) and too much consumption can't be sustained (everything will get used up.) There's of course a little leeway in there, especially when you allow for international trade such that you can use imports and exports to shore up whichever side you're lacking, but overall the two have to remain in balance or your economy collapses.
To put it another way, the economy works at the point where supply equals demand. If demand was irrelevant as you claim, we'd only ever need to look at the supply curve.
Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services
No, that's GDP. Which is a measure of economic health but its just a number -- its not an economy in itself.
USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money
That's actually the most irrelevant thing in your entire post. The US (and every other country) attempts to control its borrowing to avoid going broke just like any normal person, but just like any normal person can potentially borrow a bit more if things go down the shitter, so can the US. Certainly there is an upper limit on how far you can take that but we're nowhere near the level where they can't stimulate the economy in various ways. Have you forgotten the gigantic corporate bailout from a few years ago? That's exactly the kind of thing you're saying they can't do and recent history proves you wrong.
A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy
I suppose you've never heard of those things called "corporations?" They're pretty cool. The came into existence precisely because people wanted to do things that no one person could afford on their own, so they pooled their money (via share distribution) and voila.
the dollar came from the theft of taxation
What the hell does that have to do with anything? But to respond anyway.. taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
If you want to take that tack, you could open up a very good discussion: Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Rich people still build things. It certainly wasn't the poor who put up that ridiculous tower in Dubai.
Or to look at it another way, rich people have never built things -- they've always paid poor people to build it for them (if you take a rather loose definition of "paid" in order to include slaves..)
No matter how you want to look at it its basically just more of the same, historically speaking. The major difference now is that a large portion of the middle and even lower classes are educated and we have the internet to get informed (sort of..) as well -- that's something unprecedented in all of human history basically. Which means we have great potential to do things differently this time around.
The fact that we seem to not be doing things differently says something about us as a species, I suppose.
It might be a bit hyperbolic, but its far from delusional -- especially the part about bribes. Bribes are and have always been a tactic of the wealthy to get their way regardless of the cost to anyone else.
Murder is certainly more rare, at least in the Western world (Russia might have a different take on that.) Financial fuckery isn't as much. You occasionally hear of companies selling their product under cost in order to drive the competition out of business.
And depending on how loose you want to read the term "fuckery," you could consider the 2008 market crash as a high-end version of such -- rich people doing rich people things that screw the rest of us over and we've got basically no say in it because dollars speak louder than words in many cases.
You.. definitely do not understand global warming.
It only needs to rise by a couple of degrees to cause all of the doomsday scenarios you hear about.. I think the current estimate is about 6 degrees over pre-1900 level or somewhere in that range before shit really hits the fan, and we're currently passing 2 degrees at a fairly alarming rate.
On an individual level, 6 degrees is piss all, and will mostly be covered up by local weather patterns. Globally however things all go to hell. So no we won't be cooking.
What we'll be doing is somewhere between starving and suffocating as the biggest impact will be on plants and trees that are immobile and don't suffer rapid-but-long-lasting climate changes terribly well. Farms will have to move to suit the new climate norms and if they can't keep up we'll run into severe famines.
A bigger long-term issue that's much more difficult to just pack up and move is the rainforests and other forested areas around the world. If those start dying off we simply won't have the time to grow replacements, and we'd better hope we've invented large-scale and super-efficient O2 converters by that point.
Truth of the matter is that humanity will probably survive simply because we're clever enough to move at least a sustainable population into a system that compensates for our fuckups. The Earth as a whole will definitely survive.
But there will be centuries if not millennia of hard times and we could easily lose high percentages of the human population (even if we lost 99.9% of us, there's still plenty enough people on this planet to sustain and regrow the population!) And we'd also see the extinction of similarly high percentages of other entire species.
And of course there's always the worst of the worst of the doomsday scenarios -- the Earth just becomes completely uninhabitable for all creatures. We might manage to survive in biodome type structures for a while but that won't be long-term sustainable when the rest of the planet is barren. Then it'll be up to the deep-buried microbes to restart evolution and maybe in another couple billion years there will be a new intelligent species that can find our relics and wonder what the hell we did wrong.
How many of those to you think exist? A few hundred per school perhaps. Maybe a couple thousand for the big schools. Likely around 1-2% of any college campus is filled with students that managed to get scholarships.
try an alternative method to adulthood; vocational training
Which is fine if you really love plumbing or welding or whatever vocation you happen to get into (and I know people who do!) But its not for everybody.
Though I suppose doing a job you like (or at least don't hate) is also "entitlement" by your apparently very conservative world view, but hey we're all granted the right to pursuit of happiness and if she doesn't like trades work then she should be free to exercise that right.
the idea that your daughter is entitled to college, and a career afterwards
No, more like structured around the fact that college or equivalent is pretty much a requirement if you plan on having a career more in-depth than burger flipping or toilet scrubbing.
without having any distinguishing characteristics at all
That's rather the problem. The ability to get through college is no longer considered "distinguishing." Its considered "expected" for even relatively low-level jobs and if you don't have it you're at a serious disadvantage with respect to your peers who do, which is a large portion of the population now.
enlist her in the army... get a big fat enlistment check... a steady career, steady pay, cut and dry promotional requirements
All true. She'll also get the opportunity to shoot and be shot at by people who she has no grudge against because Donny boy says something stupid about some other world leader somewhere. Instead of working to enrich the already rich (at least not so directly,) she'll get the chance to murder and/or die for them. Improvement!
You can call it entitlement if you want, but the exact same argument you're putting forward regarding college level education could just as easily be put forward for K-12 as well. Why bother educating our kids at all? Just send them to the smithy when they turn 13 and there you go! Life solved! I mean it worked for the first few thousand years of human history.
Oh that's a shit life that nobody wants? Well sorry.. you weren't lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family so shut up and quit acting entitled! Just imagine.. poor kids learning how to read. What a stupid concept.
Doing better than when? Sure during the 80s the poor couldn't afford 55" projection systems for their homes, and now they can afford 55" LCDs! -- for other peoples' homes because poor people have trouble affording real estate anymore, especially in the larger cities, and are stuck renting for most or all of their lives whereas in the 80s it was still relatively expected that you'd own a home by your early-to-mid 30s and back in the 50s during the post-war boom it was just taken as a near guarantee that you'd get your white picket fences (at least if you were a white male or married to one, but discrimination is a whole other issue I'll leave alone for now.)
Income inequality in the US and other western countries is only really starting to get bad enough to be noticed and cautioned about. We're nowhere near the kind of stories you hear about the Middle East and Africa where warlords and kings are among the wealthiest people in the entire world while their country starves around them.
But just because we aren't there yet doesn't mean we shouldn't follow the trends and try to predict what the future will look like, and its not looking good for anyone who isn't in the 1%. Sure we may have a good century or more before it gets unsustainably bad, but its coming (presuming no new major wars or such to act as the reset switch again.)
Unfortunately like global warming, its not something you can immediately point to and say "look! Its a guarantee! We must do something right away!" And like global warming, the people best in position to curtail the issue are the same people who most benefit from keeping the status quo.
There's a lot more to it than that. You have to consider that each country will have different laws, different economic situations, etc. And of course the distributors want to abuse all of those differences to the maximum ability they can in order to retain control and/or increase profit.
As a Canadian constantly being taunted by Netflix' library, I can tell you that I don't especially like geoblocking.. but to say that it doesn't apply in the digital world is a bit silly. There are many forces beyond simple transportation that can affect sales in local contexts.
In some cases, yes. If I'm reading a page like say, Slashdot, I'd much rather have the CSS and text come through first and the logos and ad images and crap are welcome to take forever if they so desire.
But on the other hand, if you're looking at say imgur then things are a bit more dicey. The user wants the main picture to show up first, but the browser automatically determining which image is the "main" picture and which are the "see also's", without a-priori knowledge of the imgur website layout becomes quite a bit more of a challenge, and the text is nearly irrelevant in most cases on imgur.
Overall, its a very hard problem and no matter what you do, someone somewhere will develop a website that breaks the heuristics. Which is why browser developers just say "ehh screw it not worth our time."
I'd like to suggest that adding a tag that page developers could use to indicate which images/other loads are priority would be good.. but I can almost guarantee that the ads would immediately all be given top priority and we'd end up with the exact opposite of what users want.
I don't know about seatbelts but your other points aren't all THAT relevant regardless of the age of the vehicle:
- Aerodynamics is just never going to be great when you have a giant square box, and they don't want to make it not-square because that would impact their ability to stack (mostly square/rectangular) boxes inside. I guess they could put a spoiler on the roof of the cab to try and route some of the wind around the flat face of the cube but you're not likely to ever see significant smooth curves on a delivery truck.
- Doors aren't really necessary either, beyond the 2 for the cab (driver and passenger) and the main storage door. They'll be packing those boxes front-to-back in the first place according to the delivery schedule, so the driver would rarely if ever be in a position where they have to dig a package out from in front of other packages.
The video at the end.. doesn't describe it nearly as well as TFS owuld have you believe, but the missing parts are:
a) It doesn't really apply to residential / low-delivery roads.
b) If they need to do deliveries on both sides of a road, they'll route two trucks down that road -- one in either direction -- rather than having a single truck effectively turn around and go back down the same road twice (or maybe it will be the same truck after doing a bunch of right-turn-only deliveries at the far end of the road before coming back.. that sort of thing.)
So its not like the trucks are making 3 rights to circle the block, they're routing multiple trucks in smart ways to cover the same drop points while avoiding as many lefts as possible, along with some relatively sane limits (if there's only one drop in a 10 mile radius, that particular truck will just have to make a left turn if needed.)
Essentially, its a fairly regular routing algorithm but puts a much heavier weight on left turns in order to minimize them (but won't eliminate them entirely if the cost of making a left is still lower than the cost of alternative plans.)
Absolutely. But in this case its a win-win -- MS gets to advertise stronger privacy guarantees (and doesn't have to spend as much time/effort/money responding to government requests,) their customers get to rest a tiny bit easy knowing that at least they'll be notified when their privacy is breached. And even society as a whole gets to benefit as it would provide precedent for other large data storage and collection providers to also tell the government to piss off.
The only one who doesn't benefit here is the government themselves. They'll have to go back to doing crazy things like getting warrants and allowing for due process when going after people (or at least, they would in this particular circumstance.)
Certainly there are plenty of times when companies screw their customers in pursuit of profit. But sometimes the cards align and what's best for profit also happens to be best for consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately all the rhetoric and examples in the world don't make taxation be theft (any more than my example makes taxation be actually equivalent to getting an oil change.)
When a monarch demands gold from his peasants just to enrich himself and doesn't give the peasants anything in return, that's still taxation, and the peasantry don't get to say "hey you didn't give me anything in return for that" because that's not how taxes work.
Depends entirely on your definition of "anything in return." Even brutal monarchs need to fund military and whatnot (again you can argue whether your taxes are paying for things you personally think are important.)
That said (and I admit its stretching definition a bit since its hard to justify the king's new gold-plated carriage as being useful to the people,) there is also a major difference between a greedy monarch and a democratically elected representative -- the peasantry don't have any say in choosing their monarch, nor can they "fire" him short of regicide if they think he's doing a shit job of representing them, whereas an elected representative can be voted out (sometimes not soon enough, but I'll try to stay on topic!)
you'll note it's formally identical to theft
No it isn't, mostly because that "or else" clause has enormously different connotations when its the IRS asking for your taxes vs a mugger asking for your wallet.
Here, from dictionary.com's entry for "theft:"
the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another
Emphasis mine. And pretty important. Taxation isn't considered "wrongful" (well, outside of libertarian rhetoric) and therefore by definition, isn't theft regardless of anything else -- even when a greedy monarch uses the money for entirely self-serving purposes.
Of course it helps that the government (monarch or otherwise) who collects the taxes also defines "wrongful." That's part of why the US was founded with strong checks and balances against too much concentration of power -- they knew how England operated and didn't really like the prospect. Hell excessive taxation was no small part of why the US broke ties with the mother country in the first place.
What do you consider "vital information?" Most people probably don't have a text file with their SSN and credit card info just sitting there on the phone's desktop.
But location history? You don't really get to control that. Browsing history? Better remember to clear it every single time you surf the web (can you trust that its actually gone?) Contacts in your dialer.. the type of apps you use.. etc etc etc.
There's boatloads of information that your device knows about you that you didn't have to directly type in. Simple day to day usage generates plenty of information with only assumed consent, and much of that is necessary for it to perform the tasks you want it to do -- you can't really use a navigation app if you disable location tracking for example.
For the super paranoid, you're welcome to get rid of your phone and your home internet connection and try to keep a car from 1982 on the road, cancel your credit cards (and move to a new place that you can somehow rent on a cash-only basis with no names exchanged and leave no forwarding address to ensure they don't have you still on file) and so on and so on to ensure that when they come for you, they'll have to do it the old fashioned way.
For the other 99.9999% of us, we don't really have a choice. Technology is what it is and unfortunately personal privacy hasn't been much of a design consideration (yet.. hopefully..)
And to really piss you off, doing all of that super paranoid stuff I mentioned above? That gets you flagged because they assume nobody in their right mind would go to that much trouble to avoid modern conveniences and well.. they'd probably be right.
Its a bit of an unjustified leap to go from "super weird" to "dangerous" but when we're talking about tourists entering the US these days where the government has basically flat out stated that non-US citizens have less rights than your average pet and even US citizens that dare to leave the country should be viewed with extreme caution when they return.
The "all" in "All men are created equal" has been given a very narrow and constantly shrinking interpretation in recent years.
You're just assumed to be socially inept and therefore possibly unstable and a risk.
Employers have been doing it for years. The government just had to figure out a way to write it up so it didn't sound so discriminating..^W^W^W^W^W^W
Sorry I mean had to wait for a president that believes mass discrimination is the solution to all problems.
No it can't.. at least not beyond the most mundane interpretations such as "the new law could be typed up in a word processor."
Technology needs to be implemented by somebody, and if it runs afoul of laws, the cops and lawyers will simply go after the implementer. Sure that may be impractical if you write your own encrypted messenger client that you and your 3 friends use but when we're talking companies on the scale of Google and Apple and Microsoft, their choice to run afoul of the law could affect millions of users.
Think about the iPhone hack. One judge making one good decision is the only difference between Apple protecting its customers and Apple being forced to (effectively) open the flood gates for iPhone decryption -- which almost certainly would have been used as precedent if the next case featured an Android or Blackberry or whatever.
That said, using encrypted communications is not yet illegal as far as I know, or at least not in the US. I'm pretty sure master keys or similar aren't even required yet. So there's currently nothing to fix in the sense that these companies could freely implement such technologies and just choose not to.
Until they decide to call that kind of thing vandalism.
People give a shit about privacy. They just don't understand it and (more importantly) how and when its being compromised.
The biggest issue is a disconnect between where privacy is compromised and where its expected to be compromised. If I post a picture of my dog to Facebook and share it with my friends, I expect that only my friends will be able to see it. That's seems like a pretty reasonable assumption.
However, because its on FB's server, I no longer have control over the picture and that's the tricky part that many people fail to understand because there isn't really a real-world equivalent to hosting a picture on someone else' server -- at least not without invoking some heavily constructed scenarios that would be just as hard for an average person to understand as the actual problem.
At the end of the day, ignorance is ignorance whether its intentional or not, but in the unintentional case we have at least the possibility of informing people and reducing the amount of ignorance toward the issue. Unfortunately we've been pretty unsuccessful in that context as well since for the most part, all of this privacy invasion has been fairly subtle and unintrusive to the average person so its hard to convince them that there is even a problem that they're ignorant of, never mind correcting that ignorance.
Yes, but sometimes all a person has to do to help improve things is be supportive of the people with the time, energy and ability to do something more direct and show them that their fight is worthwhile.
Sometimes just asserting that you care is enough, and its certainly better than stewing quietly and keeping your mouth shut.
Imagine a world like this, where freedom was valued but violence was simply not tolerated. It is not entirely appalling.
Not entirely appalling, but unfortunately its pretty unrealistic, mostly because nobody will be willing to give wide liberties on many subjects, especially sexuality. Even if the all discriminatory laws are wiped and we somehow come to consensus on the exactly lines for things like what constitutes rape and whatnot so that everyone knows exactly the rules to follow by law.. unfortunately that does nothing for the social issues and those can be just as freedom-inhibiting as legal issues.
We already see that with for example employment: Your employer may not be legally allowed to fire you when he finds out you're gay, but suddenly every tiny mishap that would be overlooked for a "normal" person becomes potential grounds to fire you and the onus is on you to spend the time and money (at least up front) trying to convince the court that you were actually fired for your sexuality rather than because you forgot to submit your TPS report on Tuesday.
All the privacy of government spy programs with all the transparency of private corporations! What could possibly go wrong?
However, while things like houses, cars, and tuition have gone up, virtually everything that we don't need capital loans for has gone down
I'm pretty sure cars have stayed relatively flat or maybe even gone down a bit when adjusted for inflation.
A quick Google for "car price 1955" pops a quick box saying average of $1,900, which is around $17,000 in today's money. Which is about right for a moderately-featured sedan, give or take.
A house on the other hand averaged about $11,000 in 1955 (from that same quick box.) Which is around $90,000 today. So a somewhat under half of 2016's average US price $213,000.
Tuition is somewhat harder to guess at, and I won't try, due to the relative difference in how we treat post secondary education (a luxury in 1955, a near-necessity in 2017 if you plan on getting a decent job.)
Looked it up and found the discrepancy: Apparently in the US, the word scholarship does not mean what everyone else think it means. I was using it for what I guess you call "grants."
As for (US) scholarships.. that's great! So the students are only under massive debt loads for 10 years instead of 15. I mean that's a pretty good improvement, but we're still not exactly approaching free ride territory either.
why not have high school diploma accommodate what is needed for the average citizen to be competitive in the work force?
This question has been floated around seriously for a while now. The only real response so far is "because taxes." But aside from that, as you pointed out yourself, not everybody can or should go through secondary education so calling it part of high school may not be the most optimal plan. But its also not optimal for it to be available only to the super rich and the 1% lucky enough to win a scholarship -- it should be available to but not required for everybody.
That said, I don't necessarily think it needs to be 100% free for everybody (though that would be nice.) But the current system of immediately dropping the majority of students into a decade or more of overwhelming debt isn't really cool either, especially during a time when inflation is outpacing wages by leaps and bounds year after year.
What does a college provide that is necessary to participate?
Primarily at this point, a piece of paper saying that you put in your time. You could argue that this is stupid (and I would agree with you,) but unfortunately it seems to be the way things are.
why should taxpayers subsidized gender studies degrees or other useless drivel?
Why should anybody? Just shut those departments down! Research has never improved anybody's quality of life except in the cases where there's a direct and immediate guarantee of financial return!
For that matter, why should colleges have football and basketball teams? Those are even more useless to intellectual pursuits than women's studies! Let the major sports teams pay for and run their own feeder leagues!
But aside from you arbitrarily deciding who is useful to society, the main point of getting a college degree is proving you can get a degree more than specifically which one. Certainly some are more industry-focused than others but for the most part, people are looking at your degree more to learn about you as a person rather than to learn about your (mostly irrelevant) class load. I mean hell I took computer science and I work as a programmer (so about as direct a correspondence between degree and occupation as you can get,) and I bet I could count on one hand the times I've used much past the first year coursework in any real world application. But I still need that piece of paper listed on my resume in order to apply for pretty much any job -- especially in the age of first-round automated resume filtering.
Identify what makes a college degree necessary
Frankly I have no idea. But it IS necessary for most moderate-to-high level jobs and many lower-level jobs, particularly in the STEM fields.
Keep in mind there was a time, less than a century ago, when people were asking these exact same questions about high school -- primary school is good enough right? Who the hell will ever need trigonometry or Shakespeare? A grade 6-7 reading level and the four basic math operations should be sufficient for anybody, right?
It means there's a lot of people who don't know how to live in hotter conditions. Take anyone from the mountains of Colorado and throw them in summertime Arizona and they'll likely have problems. But that doesn't mean people can't live in Arizona -- they just have to adapt a bit. Sure some people may not be able to do that, but on a global scale its barely a rounding error.
Trees and plants on the other hand don't have the ability to adapt (at least not that fast.) They can't just pack up and move 100 miles north when they get sick of the heat. They have to wait thousands or even millions of years for evolution to adapt them and well.. they don't got that kind of time.
And well lets just say a few heat deaths is going to look like paradise when we're facing a year without say.. grain.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production
This is your big fallacy. Consumption is hardly a "trivial" consequence of production. You're right (sort of..) that production stimulates the economy.. at least in so much as we measure GDP by dollars worth of goods produced (you could argue that that's a poor measurement but I won't right now.)
But consumption stimulates production. Nobody produces anything that someone else doesn't want to consume (or at least they don't produce it for long..) A working economy has to be (close to) a balanced equation: Too much production and things get left out to rot (draining value from the economy) and too much consumption can't be sustained (everything will get used up.) There's of course a little leeway in there, especially when you allow for international trade such that you can use imports and exports to shore up whichever side you're lacking, but overall the two have to remain in balance or your economy collapses.
To put it another way, the economy works at the point where supply equals demand. If demand was irrelevant as you claim, we'd only ever need to look at the supply curve.
Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services
No, that's GDP. Which is a measure of economic health but its just a number -- its not an economy in itself.
USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money
That's actually the most irrelevant thing in your entire post. The US (and every other country) attempts to control its borrowing to avoid going broke just like any normal person, but just like any normal person can potentially borrow a bit more if things go down the shitter, so can the US. Certainly there is an upper limit on how far you can take that but we're nowhere near the level where they can't stimulate the economy in various ways. Have you forgotten the gigantic corporate bailout from a few years ago? That's exactly the kind of thing you're saying they can't do and recent history proves you wrong.
A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy
I suppose you've never heard of those things called "corporations?" They're pretty cool. The came into existence precisely because people wanted to do things that no one person could afford on their own, so they pooled their money (via share distribution) and voila.
the dollar came from the theft of taxation
What the hell does that have to do with anything? But to respond anyway.. taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
If you want to take that tack, you could open up a very good discussion: Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Rich people still build things. It certainly wasn't the poor who put up that ridiculous tower in Dubai.
Or to look at it another way, rich people have never built things -- they've always paid poor people to build it for them (if you take a rather loose definition of "paid" in order to include slaves..)
No matter how you want to look at it its basically just more of the same, historically speaking. The major difference now is that a large portion of the middle and even lower classes are educated and we have the internet to get informed (sort of..) as well -- that's something unprecedented in all of human history basically. Which means we have great potential to do things differently this time around.
The fact that we seem to not be doing things differently says something about us as a species, I suppose.
It might be a bit hyperbolic, but its far from delusional -- especially the part about bribes. Bribes are and have always been a tactic of the wealthy to get their way regardless of the cost to anyone else.
Murder is certainly more rare, at least in the Western world (Russia might have a different take on that.) Financial fuckery isn't as much. You occasionally hear of companies selling their product under cost in order to drive the competition out of business.
And depending on how loose you want to read the term "fuckery," you could consider the 2008 market crash as a high-end version of such -- rich people doing rich people things that screw the rest of us over and we've got basically no say in it because dollars speak louder than words in many cases.
You.. definitely do not understand global warming.
It only needs to rise by a couple of degrees to cause all of the doomsday scenarios you hear about.. I think the current estimate is about 6 degrees over pre-1900 level or somewhere in that range before shit really hits the fan, and we're currently passing 2 degrees at a fairly alarming rate.
On an individual level, 6 degrees is piss all, and will mostly be covered up by local weather patterns. Globally however things all go to hell. So no we won't be cooking.
What we'll be doing is somewhere between starving and suffocating as the biggest impact will be on plants and trees that are immobile and don't suffer rapid-but-long-lasting climate changes terribly well. Farms will have to move to suit the new climate norms and if they can't keep up we'll run into severe famines.
A bigger long-term issue that's much more difficult to just pack up and move is the rainforests and other forested areas around the world. If those start dying off we simply won't have the time to grow replacements, and we'd better hope we've invented large-scale and super-efficient O2 converters by that point.
Truth of the matter is that humanity will probably survive simply because we're clever enough to move at least a sustainable population into a system that compensates for our fuckups. The Earth as a whole will definitely survive.
But there will be centuries if not millennia of hard times and we could easily lose high percentages of the human population (even if we lost 99.9% of us, there's still plenty enough people on this planet to sustain and regrow the population!) And we'd also see the extinction of similarly high percentages of other entire species.
And of course there's always the worst of the worst of the doomsday scenarios -- the Earth just becomes completely uninhabitable for all creatures. We might manage to survive in biodome type structures for a while but that won't be long-term sustainable when the rest of the planet is barren. Then it'll be up to the deep-buried microbes to restart evolution and maybe in another couple billion years there will be a new intelligent species that can find our relics and wonder what the hell we did wrong.
doesn't have academic or athletic scholarships
How many of those to you think exist? A few hundred per school perhaps. Maybe a couple thousand for the big schools. Likely around 1-2% of any college campus is filled with students that managed to get scholarships.
try an alternative method to adulthood; vocational training
Which is fine if you really love plumbing or welding or whatever vocation you happen to get into (and I know people who do!) But its not for everybody.
Though I suppose doing a job you like (or at least don't hate) is also "entitlement" by your apparently very conservative world view, but hey we're all granted the right to pursuit of happiness and if she doesn't like trades work then she should be free to exercise that right.
the idea that your daughter is entitled to college, and a career afterwards
No, more like structured around the fact that college or equivalent is pretty much a requirement if you plan on having a career more in-depth than burger flipping or toilet scrubbing.
without having any distinguishing characteristics at all
That's rather the problem. The ability to get through college is no longer considered "distinguishing." Its considered "expected" for even relatively low-level jobs and if you don't have it you're at a serious disadvantage with respect to your peers who do, which is a large portion of the population now.
enlist her in the army... get a big fat enlistment check... a steady career, steady pay, cut and dry promotional requirements
All true. She'll also get the opportunity to shoot and be shot at by people who she has no grudge against because Donny boy says something stupid about some other world leader somewhere. Instead of working to enrich the already rich (at least not so directly,) she'll get the chance to murder and/or die for them. Improvement!
You can call it entitlement if you want, but the exact same argument you're putting forward regarding college level education could just as easily be put forward for K-12 as well. Why bother educating our kids at all? Just send them to the smithy when they turn 13 and there you go! Life solved! I mean it worked for the first few thousand years of human history.
Oh that's a shit life that nobody wants? Well sorry.. you weren't lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family so shut up and quit acting entitled! Just imagine.. poor kids learning how to read. What a stupid concept.
Doing better than when? Sure during the 80s the poor couldn't afford 55" projection systems for their homes, and now they can afford 55" LCDs! -- for other peoples' homes because poor people have trouble affording real estate anymore, especially in the larger cities, and are stuck renting for most or all of their lives whereas in the 80s it was still relatively expected that you'd own a home by your early-to-mid 30s and back in the 50s during the post-war boom it was just taken as a near guarantee that you'd get your white picket fences (at least if you were a white male or married to one, but discrimination is a whole other issue I'll leave alone for now.)
Income inequality in the US and other western countries is only really starting to get bad enough to be noticed and cautioned about. We're nowhere near the kind of stories you hear about the Middle East and Africa where warlords and kings are among the wealthiest people in the entire world while their country starves around them.
But just because we aren't there yet doesn't mean we shouldn't follow the trends and try to predict what the future will look like, and its not looking good for anyone who isn't in the 1%. Sure we may have a good century or more before it gets unsustainably bad, but its coming (presuming no new major wars or such to act as the reset switch again.)
Unfortunately like global warming, its not something you can immediately point to and say "look! Its a guarantee! We must do something right away!" And like global warming, the people best in position to curtail the issue are the same people who most benefit from keeping the status quo.
There's a lot more to it than that. You have to consider that each country will have different laws, different economic situations, etc. And of course the distributors want to abuse all of those differences to the maximum ability they can in order to retain control and/or increase profit.
As a Canadian constantly being taunted by Netflix' library, I can tell you that I don't especially like geoblocking.. but to say that it doesn't apply in the digital world is a bit silly. There are many forces beyond simple transportation that can affect sales in local contexts.
In some cases, yes. If I'm reading a page like say, Slashdot, I'd much rather have the CSS and text come through first and the logos and ad images and crap are welcome to take forever if they so desire.
But on the other hand, if you're looking at say imgur then things are a bit more dicey. The user wants the main picture to show up first, but the browser automatically determining which image is the "main" picture and which are the "see also's", without a-priori knowledge of the imgur website layout becomes quite a bit more of a challenge, and the text is nearly irrelevant in most cases on imgur.
Overall, its a very hard problem and no matter what you do, someone somewhere will develop a website that breaks the heuristics. Which is why browser developers just say "ehh screw it not worth our time."
I'd like to suggest that adding a tag that page developers could use to indicate which images/other loads are priority would be good.. but I can almost guarantee that the ads would immediately all be given top priority and we'd end up with the exact opposite of what users want.
I don't know about seatbelts but your other points aren't all THAT relevant regardless of the age of the vehicle:
- Aerodynamics is just never going to be great when you have a giant square box, and they don't want to make it not-square because that would impact their ability to stack (mostly square/rectangular) boxes inside. I guess they could put a spoiler on the roof of the cab to try and route some of the wind around the flat face of the cube but you're not likely to ever see significant smooth curves on a delivery truck.
- Doors aren't really necessary either, beyond the 2 for the cab (driver and passenger) and the main storage door. They'll be packing those boxes front-to-back in the first place according to the delivery schedule, so the driver would rarely if ever be in a position where they have to dig a package out from in front of other packages.
The video at the end.. doesn't describe it nearly as well as TFS owuld have you believe, but the missing parts are:
a) It doesn't really apply to residential / low-delivery roads.
b) If they need to do deliveries on both sides of a road, they'll route two trucks down that road -- one in either direction -- rather than having a single truck effectively turn around and go back down the same road twice (or maybe it will be the same truck after doing a bunch of right-turn-only deliveries at the far end of the road before coming back.. that sort of thing.)
So its not like the trucks are making 3 rights to circle the block, they're routing multiple trucks in smart ways to cover the same drop points while avoiding as many lefts as possible, along with some relatively sane limits (if there's only one drop in a 10 mile radius, that particular truck will just have to make a left turn if needed.)
Essentially, its a fairly regular routing algorithm but puts a much heavier weight on left turns in order to minimize them (but won't eliminate them entirely if the cost of making a left is still lower than the cost of alternative plans.)
Absolutely. But in this case its a win-win -- MS gets to advertise stronger privacy guarantees (and doesn't have to spend as much time/effort/money responding to government requests,) their customers get to rest a tiny bit easy knowing that at least they'll be notified when their privacy is breached. And even society as a whole gets to benefit as it would provide precedent for other large data storage and collection providers to also tell the government to piss off.
The only one who doesn't benefit here is the government themselves. They'll have to go back to doing crazy things like getting warrants and allowing for due process when going after people (or at least, they would in this particular circumstance.)
Certainly there are plenty of times when companies screw their customers in pursuit of profit. But sometimes the cards align and what's best for profit also happens to be best for consumers.