My problem with General Intelligence is it's frequently a proxy for cultural awareness that's used by the dominant preppy-ass culture to justify them having more nice things then good old boys. I, for example, have sufficient felicity with the language that I can explain precisely why the phrase "sufficient felicity with the language" is somewhat of an infelicity. Most people are gonna need to spend some time on Wiktionary to understand that an infelicity is an awkward way to say something, so my original statement ("sufficient felicity with the language") literally means "sufficient unawkwardness with the language," which is a really awkward way to put it. Since people like me write IQ tests I will never waste time on an IQ test trying to figure out what some obscure word means.I already know it.
Moreover since people like me like to do shit like take IQ tests as part of a group to see whose smartest I will have a major advantage over many others because I've probably seen the questions before.
Which in turn means that while my performance on IQ tests can be meaningfully compared to my fellow college-educated-white-people's results it's really hard to argue that my success on an English-language IQ test designed by (and for) Anglophone, college-educated, American white people can be meaningfully compared to the performance of some Indian guy with a PhD in engineering whose mother is illiterate. He probably has more "General Intelligence" then me, because going from illiterate mother to PhD in a technical subject requires lots of brains, but coasting through a liberal arts course in a major University with a 2.6 does not. But since English is his second language, I will kick his ass on the test.
That didn't stop them from fighting Microsoft, which until very recently bought metaphorical ink by the barrel as part-owner of MSNBC.
This is the government. At some point some guy who happens to have a non-US Twitter account will do something bad and tweet it to his friends. The Feds will want his email address, his IP, and access to his deleted posts. They will have probable cause, so they will get a warrant. Europe will go ballistic. The US public will be evenly divided between a) people who do not give a shit and b) people who think Twitter should stop protecting criminals.
Fighting the NSA would actually be worse because they'd have to do it in secret court, and it's never worked before.
I fail to see how an IQ in the top 10% of the population can be called mediocre...
The way the economy works people tend to sort themselves into groups. Top 10%, for example, would be 120; but most of those 10% have college degrees. Since the mentally handicapped don't go to college, and it actually takes some skill to get through, college grad IQ is gonna be above 100. Most sources I read show 110-115. And 120 is not that much more then 110. Moreover if you're actually in the 120 group you'll probably be associated with highly analytical people who score very well on tests. You're an engineer, or the guy they send to talk to engineers, you'll think your 120 isn't a big deal because everybody you know who has told you his IQ is in the 130s.
Look at it this way: let's say you're a 1 in a million basketball player. There are 310 million Americans, so you've got 310 American peers. Let's further say you're the 310th. You all play in the NBA. You're probably a marginal NBA player because non-Americans are allowed in, so you're competing against 309 Americans who are better then you and 90-100 foreigners who are literally in your league. Since there are 30 teams with 15 roster spots there are 450 spots, and you're likely second-string on a really bad team (backing up the guy who tries not to get embarrassed by Lebron) or third string to a guy like Lebron. Your basketball IQ score is literally unmeasurable (most IQ systems stop at 160 or 1 in 30k), but since you spend your life dealing with the other unmeasureables you probably think of yourself as mediocre to bad.
Who was a better engineer, Lee Felsestein or Woz? Hard to say. Woz was an unparalleled genius in getting less chips to do the same thing who designed the first popular computer system from chips to OS personally, Felsenstein did pretty much the same thing for one of the first trult portable computers.
Who have the kids heard of? Woz, because he was attached to a genius salesman with the drive to succeed, and they brought in a really smart businessman (Markkula) to do the technical finance/manufacturing shit. Felsenstein is totally unknown because he was attached to Adam Osborne, whose tendency to convince the press that the next great Osborne Computer was so good everybody should wait for it (and nobody should buy the current computer) coined the phrase "he osborned it" when the company went bankrupt.
IQ is somewhat important in determining whether you're a success, but there are so many other aspects that are more important. Networking, including the network you get at birth from your parents/neighborhood/elementary school; emotional ability to work with other people; etc. are at least as important as IQ score.
The Executive Branch of New York State was using it's law enforcement powers to enforce a Statute passed by the Legislative branch. The Courts had no skin in the game of who won that particular point, and had multiple interests to consider (ie: is the interest of the public in having access to Swiss banks more or less important then the public's interest in helping return Nazi loot).
You'll note that in a case where the Court's own interests were at stake (tax evasion means less money for the Judicial system), and there's no public interest defense in keeping tax money from the Federal government; the government got access to all the personal information it wanted.
In this case there is an actual Court ordering companies to give data to the NSA. You do not have to like the FISA Court, or think it's morally legitimate, to acknowledge that US District Courts are technically below the Appelatte-level FISA Court, and therefore have to follow FISA Court orders. Moreover it's twitter. All tweets are, by definition, public. The only data that twitter can possibly protect from the NSA would be a) deleted tweets (assuming the NSA doesn't have the budget for a 24/7 data miner on twitter.com), and b) which email address is attached to which twitter handle.
Which basically means the public interest the Court would be considering is the public's interest in keeping which email addresses are associated with their twitter handles secret vs. the public's interest in not being blown up by terrorists. Given that they won't give the public standing to defend said public's private email communications, I sincerely doubt they're gonna say "well gee, precisely which email is attached to the twitter account is being used to advocate death to Americans (like my feudal overlord and personal hero Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts) is very sensitive information and should stay private."
In this case, yes the original onus is on the government. But it's trivial. They simply say "But you're the CEO, stop playing dumb, somebody in your office can get to those servers or you're not really the CEO" and they have satisfied their burden. Now it's twitter's turn. They have to prove that their system is designed so that nobody in the US can get at the database.
Which in turn means that if their guys develop the database software in the US, and update it world-wide, they have a real fucking problem because the Court can (and will) simply order them to update the database to undo all their security measures.
This is the fucking government. You don't hack your way around them and get egoboo from Congress. You hack your way around them and they fucking hound you to fucking suicide because that is their fucking job.
So the FISA Courts will order the Twitter CEO to do shit, and he'll refuse, and get away with it on the basis of posse comitatus, which prevents the use of the military for law enforcement? The FISA Courts have never thought they're ordering law enforcement-related searches or seizures of data.
Why would the Courts rule Twitter isn't "a US Company"? It started in America, it's IP is American, it's employees are American, it's Executives are US Citizens living in America, etc.
The legal system is similar to a computer program in that it is a series of somewhat logical principles akin to an algorithm. It is completely 100% different because the actual humans who run it can tell when you're trying to get around their rules, and part of their algorithm is to say "No, fuck you for wasting my time, and here's a fine."
Hell, even if it works and the government can't order twitter to tell them shit, it can definitely serve a warrant on the American CEO in America, and when he fails to comply because his company isn't an American piece of paper it's an Irish piece of paper they can lock his ass up until his engineers cough up the information. Microsoft is actually trying this strategy in the US Court system, and as of December they were appealing because the District Court took one look at their argument and said "Moron, I am not a fucking computer, you can;t hack me that easily."
The NSA doesn't have jurisdiction over twitter because some complicated rule of international legal procedure says it does, it has jurisdiction in the US because US Courts can order US Cops to arrest the Twitter employees who refuse to hand them information. Microsoft has tried this, and while I don't think they've officially lost yet, it's very difficult for me to see a reason for them to win. The Constitution is silent on the matter of what happens when Court Orders affect people in other countries, which means there's absolutely no reason for them to give a shit about jurisdiction. In fact in several cases the US has sent Agents into foreign countries secretly, arrested/spied upon/etc. private citizens against the laws of those countries, and when they've gotten back to the US the Courts have said "great, the bad guy's fucked, when can you arrange a chump public defender so we can schedule the execution?"
OTOH, it's likely this is all PR because European customers live in places where the Constitution spends a half-goddamn page describing the precise geographic limits of it's jurisdiction. They don't understand that a) when our Constitution was written a good 90% of the land mass of the US was somebody else's, b) no we did not amend the damn thing with the Gadsden Purchase, and c) the whole damn thing's supposed to be on a single page.
It's also an interesting defense of their Irish tax strategy. "Of course we pay the ridiculously low Irish tax rate. We'd pay the US Tax Rate, but the NSA Gestapo would demand access to our servers."
Don't get me wrong. I'll never argue that Argentina isn't uniquely fucked up by it's internal politics. They are self-centred to the point of self-parody (nobody else would propose ending an Arms race by proposing the other side sell them half their Navy), and they started from a remarkably good condition.
But you know who had a worse economic position then most of the world, including all of Latin America, in the early 60s? South Korea. Much of their economy was based on mercenaries they sent to fight the Vietnam War, their leader was maniacal dictator who'd overthrown a democratically elected President, per capita income in '61 was somewhere between $80-$160, etc. And now they're fucking rich because he had turned out to be the right maniacal dictator.
So while I agree that Argentina's results are a warning to all sane people, I also submit that much of the rest of the region is still poor because they refuse to deal with their core problem: that their politics are nearly as screwed up as Argentina's. Google Bolivia's "Day of the Sea" if you want a particularly extreme example of a Latin American country rallying around a quixotic demand for something everyone (including themselves) know they can't really have.
I agree on oil wealth. You get a lot of really rich guys who want to turn their cities into London, a strong military to keep somebody else from grabbing the money, and (if you're lucky) a local civilian population where everybody has multiple advanced degrees in geology and nobody knows how to change a tire. That's what immigrants are for, native citizens are much better off joining the biggest industry in the country, extraction. It works until the oil runs out, and then there's no money to pay the military and no work for several million highly educated geologists.
Like every piece of "evidence" you've offered, it only makes sense if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It has six Latin American countries. Two of them are richer then five of the 12 European countries on the list. There were several dozen countries in both Latin America and Europe during this time period, the European list does not even include the UK (but does include 26-County Ireland, which did not actually exist at the time).
But please tell me I'm stupid because I spent time learning facts about how the world has changed over the past four or five generations, and you're a genius because you can make ridiculous rationalization about how the past was just like today.
Goddamn it the Microsoft link was for another post. I really hate having to think in HTML for one goddamn board. The Nationmaster link was actually my first intended link. Which you knew because it's the first thing you found, and I specifically quoted Chile's place on the list. If you were actually worried about the excel file you would have gone to the main site, seen it's a reputable university, and downloaded. Which strongly implies you're the one whose trolling because he knows he's been caught with his facts down. Especially when combined with your insistence on ad hominem.
You are very poorly versed in Latin American history. The reason for most of our interventions in the 30s were attempts to throw the foreign (read: American) corporations out. We didn't put up with that shit back then. A major point of the Communist movements of the 70s and 80s was to get rid of those corporations. If you deal with actual Latin Americans you will quickly find most of them conflate US Foreign Policy with the policies of [insert appropriate corporate overlord] because from 1900 through the 70s that was true. Most of them will say they think this has changed, and the US is highly unlikely to order the local air force to level the Presidential Palace because some corporate overlord gave the word, but they don't seem to believe it in their hearts.
Just realized my response was only kinda-sorta answering your point, so here's a more direct one: Argentina could have done fine with some level of protectionism, even a high level of protectionism. The Brazilians of the 80s famously protected themselves out of major parts of the computer revolution until the 90s and they're doing fine.
The problem is the Argentine version of protectionism involves seizing foreign business assets, which means that when the other side wins an election and decides to try to attract foreign investment it has to offer prices only a fool could refuse because only a fool wants to be in business in Argentina when the political landscape shifts again.
Or Venezuela. That oil wealth is more then enough to build a real economy where everyone can participate. In theory there was also no reason that Nicaragua of 1870 couldn't invest in public education and railroads (it is the 1870s after all), and end up richer per capita then damn near anyone.
The problem is a whole suite of interlocking problems, but they all center on a) these countries have intricate US-inspireed political systems that are designed to fail miserably in the absence of near unanimity among the people, and b) their total lack of unanimity on any issue. The US works, for exdample, because for everyone involved a functioning system almost exactly like the one we had last week is much preferable to saying "fuck it, let's shut down the government." Thus the life and death struggles over whether the extremely rich should pay a marginal tax rate of 35% or 39.6%.
For an example of how this system can fail catastrophically, check out the recent i>coup d'tat in Honduras. The Old President repeatedly refused to drop plans for a referendum allowing him to run for a third term, even after the Supreme Court ruled that he could not implement such a referendum. More then once. Legally speaking the Senate had every right to fire him, the New President had every right to order the Army to storm the Presidential Palace, and the Old President had every right to call it a coup d'tat. And literally none of that shit could have happened if they'd had a Constitutional set-up similar to India, South Africa, or Canada. They have no term limits law to fight over, Checks and Balances consist almost entirely of the Court System enforcing the Constitution (with possible residual use of the Head of State's power in extreme circumstances), and the Head of Government is always 100% responsible to the Legislature so there's no need for a coup d'tat like maneuver to get rid of him when he pisses off one House or the other.
In this case one of the issues they are extremely divided on is their nation's relationship with the global economy as represented by foreign (generally US) Corporations. It's simply true that if the region had some political consensus on the issue which allowed the corporations to operate in the country under reasonable legal terms earning a reasonable profit the political instability would have been less poisonous for economic growth. And if there's economic growth it's much easier to maintain political stability, because you can do shit like cut taxes and increase public spending at the same time without going into unsustainable deficits.
OTOH, if half the country is convinced that letting US Fruit have a profit margin lower then 20% will reduce them to pecuniary, and the other half is convinced that USD Fruit's profit margin could easily be seized by a High School educated politician and redistributed to make everyone rich, you're gonna have some pretty big fucking problems. And the political system won;t let you paper them over until they go away.
In 1900 a significant fraction of of Europe wasn't industrialized. Norway and Finland were relative backwaters, and the Balkans are large enough to be "much of Europe" all by themselves. Chile and Venezuela were all quite wealthy in per capita terms in 1900.
The region as a whole was comparable to Eastern Europe. I suspect that if you broke out Yugoslavia by it's 2014 borders, and split Czechoslovakia, the University of Groenigan's per capita incomes in Eastern Europe would actually be below Latin America.
Apparently you don't know much actual history. In 1900 Latin America was much wealthier per capita then much of Europe. Chile for example, was 16th on this list beating Norway. Argentina was particularly wealthy because in 1900 they all ate meat, and since most of the world hadn't industrialized eating meat made them one of the wealthier states in the world.
According to the University of Gronigen in 1900 Chile, Columbia, Argentina, and Venezuela were all above $2k per capita. Nobody in Eastern Europe was at $2k. In the West Finland, those poor Norwegians, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy were all well below $2k. The total regional income (which is biased towards low numbers because there are a lot of poor states in the Caribbean and Central America) of $1.1-$1.2k is above Yugoslavia and Albania, and comparable to the Bulgarians, Greeks and Portuguese.
So yes, the numbers indicate that in 1900 Latin America was richer per capita then much of Europe.
In 1900 Latin American was richer per capita then most of Europe. They are no longer richer then most of Europe primarily because most of the region periodically insists on throwing the foreign corporations out. Then after the economy collapses they they are forced to invite the foreigners back in under ridiculously generous terms. Many of the countries (especially the Central American ones and Argentina) have yet to figure out that if you let the foreign companies in under reasonable terms once, things go so much better in the long-term.
Like it or not you don't get a growing economy without large corporations. You clearly have to regulate the shit out of those corporations, but you also have to let them make their 3%-10% profit margin every year or they go away and instead of having a bunch of investment and new jobs you get to be Argentina. In this case google makes money by sponsored results. no sponsored results, means google goes away. Since there are no alternative models for funding a search engine on normal computers (as opposed to Phones, where Apple and co. make enough on the hardware to fund Siri); the EU winning this case means that it will be very difficult to run a search engine in Europe. That's not a smart hill for the EU to die on.
The difficulty google has given Microsoft in getting apps onto Android, OTOH, is a smart one. Google and Android will survive fine if Microsoft has the right to sell it's services on those devices.
Frankly I can't figure out Microsoft's long game on this.
They're alleging that google is breaking EU rules by a) being really big, and b) relying on revenue from sponsored results. If it works this will drive google out of Europe, but it won't help Microsoft because then Bing will become the number one European search engine and 100% of Bing's revenue (which also comes from sponsored results) will be illegal. Pardon me, there's Yahoo, but Yahoo and Bing have an alliance running their sponsored ads through Microsoft.
I suspect they're going for some weird side-deal from google (ie: let us have a Youtube app), but that doesn't seem like a very smart strategy. Google is not the kind of company that gives up to this kind of BS until it really has to, and by the time it really has to it'll be too late.
The exploration as default thing permeates the culture. The Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox if you understand that a) breaking the light barrier may be possible, but will definitely cost a fortune, and b) any single star system has more then enough resources to feed an arbitrarily large number of people. Seriously. Why would we send multiple missions to any given star system in a year if we have everything we need here?
If we're sending like one mission every five years, and only to the very nearest systems, how would the inhabitants of the system tell that our probe/ship/etc. isn't some obscure natural phenomena. And if this is likely to happen to us, why wouldn't it happen to any hypothetical star-faring race close enough to send those probes?
I haven't read much non-white SciFi, but a lot of my recent stuff has been set in places that aren't typical for SciFi/fantasy. Alif the Unseen is set in a fictional Gulf Monarchy (and written by a woman), River of Gods is set in a futuristic India. Part of the appeal was that they weren't just a bunch of suburbanites doing the same shit that Heinlein talked about a decade before I was born.
I actually find I have more trouble reading SciFi about countries I'm familiar with because I have more trouble suspending disbelief. No Mr. Author, Congress would not vote to authorize that. Since I have no fucking clue how Pakistan's parliament operates I just can't subject it to the same level of scrutiny.
The white suburban person SciFi that actually grabs tends not to be about technology, but either about military operations (David Weber, Eric Flint, the whole Baen crowd), or exploring fictional alien cultures (authors like CJ Cherryh and Iain M Banks Culture series).
This might be due to the ganging up of the SJWs on the victims. This is what pisses off a large group of people, both conservative and liberal, and generates a large response. If, however, you compare the arshole comments of the SJWs to those attacking them, it's a push.
I've never seen a so-called SJW actually gang up on anyone in particular.
Sometimes you'll see somebody say "this gay/Asian/etc. author did great and you should nominate him for this award," or "Yippee, a black guy finally won an award," but nobody goes out of their way to say any of the individual white guys nominated, or the ones who won in past years sucked. It's pretty much exactly what happens when an author prominent in some unprestigious sub genre of SciFi (say David Weber's Military SF), actually gets nominated for something, or wins. His fans are gonna be happy because their guy won, and they will say so, but they aren't gonna start threads on how the great injustice of last year';s winner has been overturned.
OTOH, the people who think "Social Justice Warriors" exist outside of their own skulls frequently argue that [insert non-white author] sucked and only won an award because he's not white.
Even the White House can't really force them to do jack-squat. Vietnam, the Iraq War, etc. have all shown that the ability of westerners to influence non-Western societies is quite limited.
The reason the boycott against Indiana worked is that Tim Cook is an American, and he speaks for a lot of people within Indiana's borders. They care what he thinks, they want his business, and they really don't want their opponents within the state to have a) access to Tim Cook money and b) the argument that Indiana's fucked itself over in the business world because Apple' pissed at it.
On the other hand, it's really hard to get other countries to do what we want. Uganda actually likes us, and wants to be like us, and their response to our protests that they were about to pass a law that gave gays the death sentence was change it to life imprisonment while bitching about neo-colonialism and Ugandan values.
Whether it's overblown or not isn't relevant to the question of whether most people (and particularly the ones who are Judges) think it was a good idea.
As for your fears about being declared a terrorist, welcome to fucking America. The Commander-in-Chief clause is specifically designed so you do not have the right to prevent the President from oppressing you. If he thinks he has legitimate Commander-in-Chief reasons to lock you up then you get locked up. He doesn't need a statute, or a Court Order (altho he'd prefer both if he can get them). Your legal remedy is to challenge your detention in Court while you rot in prison. The only penalty you'll receive even if you turn out to be a non-terrorist is compensation, and that will probably take an Act of Congress because the Founders didn't see fit to include anything more automatic in their Constitution.
The reason is that in 1789 a significant proportion of the population were still loyal to the British Crown. 4% of them actually fled to Canada, and form the basis of the Anglophone Canadian community. They did not want some guy with undying loyalty to the King and a keg of gunpowder to have Constitutional rights, therefore they specifically designed the Constitution so the President could circumvent his rights. The Checks are that a) Commander-in-Chief powers are ad hoc, so that after the threat is passed our gunpowder toting Tory gets free, and b) the Tory can appeal to the ordinary Courts claiming he's not evil and the Commander-in-Chief powers don't apply to him. Which is a completely different design principle then the rest of the Constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with General Intelligence is it's frequently a proxy for cultural awareness that's used by the dominant preppy-ass culture to justify them having more nice things then good old boys. I, for example, have sufficient felicity with the language that I can explain precisely why the phrase "sufficient felicity with the language" is somewhat of an infelicity. Most people are gonna need to spend some time on Wiktionary to understand that an infelicity is an awkward way to say something, so my original statement ("sufficient felicity with the language") literally means "sufficient unawkwardness with the language," which is a really awkward way to put it. Since people like me write IQ tests I will never waste time on an IQ test trying to figure out what some obscure word means.I already know it.
Moreover since people like me like to do shit like take IQ tests as part of a group to see whose smartest I will have a major advantage over many others because I've probably seen the questions before.
Which in turn means that while my performance on IQ tests can be meaningfully compared to my fellow college-educated-white-people's results it's really hard to argue that my success on an English-language IQ test designed by (and for) Anglophone, college-educated, American white people can be meaningfully compared to the performance of some Indian guy with a PhD in engineering whose mother is illiterate. He probably has more "General Intelligence" then me, because going from illiterate mother to PhD in a technical subject requires lots of brains, but coasting through a liberal arts course in a major University with a 2.6 does not. But since English is his second language, I will kick his ass on the test.
That didn't stop them from fighting Microsoft, which until very recently bought metaphorical ink by the barrel as part-owner of MSNBC.
This is the government. At some point some guy who happens to have a non-US Twitter account will do something bad and tweet it to his friends. The Feds will want his email address, his IP, and access to his deleted posts. They will have probable cause, so they will get a warrant. Europe will go ballistic. The US public will be evenly divided between a) people who do not give a shit and b) people who think Twitter should stop protecting criminals.
Fighting the NSA would actually be worse because they'd have to do it in secret court, and it's never worked before.
I fail to see how an IQ in the top 10% of the population can be called mediocre...
The way the economy works people tend to sort themselves into groups. Top 10%, for example, would be 120; but most of those 10% have college degrees. Since the mentally handicapped don't go to college, and it actually takes some skill to get through, college grad IQ is gonna be above 100. Most sources I read show 110-115. And 120 is not that much more then 110. Moreover if you're actually in the 120 group you'll probably be associated with highly analytical people who score very well on tests. You're an engineer, or the guy they send to talk to engineers, you'll think your 120 isn't a big deal because everybody you know who has told you his IQ is in the 130s.
Look at it this way: let's say you're a 1 in a million basketball player. There are 310 million Americans, so you've got 310 American peers. Let's further say you're the 310th. You all play in the NBA. You're probably a marginal NBA player because non-Americans are allowed in, so you're competing against 309 Americans who are better then you and 90-100 foreigners who are literally in your league. Since there are 30 teams with 15 roster spots there are 450 spots, and you're likely second-string on a really bad team (backing up the guy who tries not to get embarrassed by Lebron) or third string to a guy like Lebron. Your basketball IQ score is literally unmeasurable (most IQ systems stop at 160 or 1 in 30k), but since you spend your life dealing with the other unmeasureables you probably think of yourself as mediocre to bad.
Who was a better engineer, Lee Felsestein or Woz? Hard to say. Woz was an unparalleled genius in getting less chips to do the same thing who designed the first popular computer system from chips to OS personally, Felsenstein did pretty much the same thing for one of the first trult portable computers.
Who have the kids heard of? Woz, because he was attached to a genius salesman with the drive to succeed, and they brought in a really smart businessman (Markkula) to do the technical finance/manufacturing shit. Felsenstein is totally unknown because he was attached to Adam Osborne, whose tendency to convince the press that the next great Osborne Computer was so good everybody should wait for it (and nobody should buy the current computer) coined the phrase "he osborned it" when the company went bankrupt.
IQ is somewhat important in determining whether you're a success, but there are so many other aspects that are more important. Networking, including the network you get at birth from your parents/neighborhood/elementary school; emotional ability to work with other people; etc. are at least as important as IQ score.
Analogy fail.
The Executive Branch of New York State was using it's law enforcement powers to enforce a Statute passed by the Legislative branch. The Courts had no skin in the game of who won that particular point, and had multiple interests to consider (ie: is the interest of the public in having access to Swiss banks more or less important then the public's interest in helping return Nazi loot).
You'll note that in a case where the Court's own interests were at stake (tax evasion means less money for the Judicial system), and there's no public interest defense in keeping tax money from the Federal government; the government got access to all the personal information it wanted.
In this case there is an actual Court ordering companies to give data to the NSA. You do not have to like the FISA Court, or think it's morally legitimate, to acknowledge that US District Courts are technically below the Appelatte-level FISA Court, and therefore have to follow FISA Court orders. Moreover it's twitter. All tweets are, by definition, public. The only data that twitter can possibly protect from the NSA would be a) deleted tweets (assuming the NSA doesn't have the budget for a 24/7 data miner on twitter.com), and b) which email address is attached to which twitter handle.
Which basically means the public interest the Court would be considering is the public's interest in keeping which email addresses are associated with their twitter handles secret vs. the public's interest in not being blown up by terrorists. Given that they won't give the public standing to defend said public's private email communications, I sincerely doubt they're gonna say "well gee, precisely which email is attached to the twitter account is being used to advocate death to Americans (like my feudal overlord and personal hero Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts) is very sensitive information and should stay private."
In this case, yes the original onus is on the government. But it's trivial. They simply say "But you're the CEO, stop playing dumb, somebody in your office can get to those servers or you're not really the CEO" and they have satisfied their burden. Now it's twitter's turn. They have to prove that their system is designed so that nobody in the US can get at the database.
Which in turn means that if their guys develop the database software in the US, and update it world-wide, they have a real fucking problem because the Court can (and will) simply order them to update the database to undo all their security measures.
This is the fucking government. You don't hack your way around them and get egoboo from Congress. You hack your way around them and they fucking hound you to fucking suicide because that is their fucking job.
So the FISA Courts will order the Twitter CEO to do shit, and he'll refuse, and get away with it on the basis of posse comitatus, which prevents the use of the military for law enforcement? The FISA Courts have never thought they're ordering law enforcement-related searches or seizures of data.
So good luck with that buddy.
Why would the Courts rule Twitter isn't "a US Company"? It started in America, it's IP is American, it's employees are American, it's Executives are US Citizens living in America, etc.
The legal system is similar to a computer program in that it is a series of somewhat logical principles akin to an algorithm. It is completely 100% different because the actual humans who run it can tell when you're trying to get around their rules, and part of their algorithm is to say "No, fuck you for wasting my time, and here's a fine."
Hell, even if it works and the government can't order twitter to tell them shit, it can definitely serve a warrant on the American CEO in America, and when he fails to comply because his company isn't an American piece of paper it's an Irish piece of paper they can lock his ass up until his engineers cough up the information. Microsoft is actually trying this strategy in the US Court system, and as of December they were appealing because the District Court took one look at their argument and said "Moron, I am not a fucking computer, you can;t hack me that easily."
The NSA doesn't have jurisdiction over twitter because some complicated rule of international legal procedure says it does, it has jurisdiction in the US because US Courts can order US Cops to arrest the Twitter employees who refuse to hand them information. Microsoft has tried this, and while I don't think they've officially lost yet, it's very difficult for me to see a reason for them to win. The Constitution is silent on the matter of what happens when Court Orders affect people in other countries, which means there's absolutely no reason for them to give a shit about jurisdiction. In fact in several cases the US has sent Agents into foreign countries secretly, arrested/spied upon/etc. private citizens against the laws of those countries, and when they've gotten back to the US the Courts have said "great, the bad guy's fucked, when can you arrange a chump public defender so we can schedule the execution?"
OTOH, it's likely this is all PR because European customers live in places where the Constitution spends a half-goddamn page describing the precise geographic limits of it's jurisdiction. They don't understand that a) when our Constitution was written a good 90% of the land mass of the US was somebody else's, b) no we did not amend the damn thing with the Gadsden Purchase, and c) the whole damn thing's supposed to be on a single page.
It's also an interesting defense of their Irish tax strategy. "Of course we pay the ridiculously low Irish tax rate. We'd pay the US Tax Rate, but the NSA Gestapo would demand access to our servers."
Don't get me wrong. I'll never argue that Argentina isn't uniquely fucked up by it's internal politics. They are self-centred to the point of self-parody (nobody else would propose ending an Arms race by proposing the other side sell them half their Navy), and they started from a remarkably good condition.
But you know who had a worse economic position then most of the world, including all of Latin America, in the early 60s? South Korea. Much of their economy was based on mercenaries they sent to fight the Vietnam War, their leader was maniacal dictator who'd overthrown a democratically elected President, per capita income in '61 was somewhere between $80-$160, etc. And now they're fucking rich because he had turned out to be the right maniacal dictator.
So while I agree that Argentina's results are a warning to all sane people, I also submit that much of the rest of the region is still poor because they refuse to deal with their core problem: that their politics are nearly as screwed up as Argentina's. Google Bolivia's "Day of the Sea" if you want a particularly extreme example of a Latin American country rallying around a quixotic demand for something everyone (including themselves) know they can't really have.
I agree on oil wealth. You get a lot of really rich guys who want to turn their cities into London, a strong military to keep somebody else from grabbing the money, and (if you're lucky) a local civilian population where everybody has multiple advanced degrees in geology and nobody knows how to change a tire. That's what immigrants are for, native citizens are much better off joining the biggest industry in the country, extraction. It works until the oil runs out, and then there's no money to pay the military and no work for several million highly educated geologists.
Like every piece of "evidence" you've offered, it only makes sense if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It has six Latin American countries. Two of them are richer then five of the 12 European countries on the list. There were several dozen countries in both Latin America and Europe during this time period, the European list does not even include the UK (but does include 26-County Ireland, which did not actually exist at the time).
But please tell me I'm stupid because I spent time learning facts about how the world has changed over the past four or five generations, and you're a genius because you can make ridiculous rationalization about how the past was just like today.
Goddamn it the Microsoft link was for another post. I really hate having to think in HTML for one goddamn board. The Nationmaster link was actually my first intended link. Which you knew because it's the first thing you found, and I specifically quoted Chile's place on the list. If you were actually worried about the excel file you would have gone to the main site, seen it's a reputable university, and downloaded. Which strongly implies you're the one whose trolling because he knows he's been caught with his facts down. Especially when combined with your insistence on ad hominem.
You are very poorly versed in Latin American history. The reason for most of our interventions in the 30s were attempts to throw the foreign (read: American) corporations out. We didn't put up with that shit back then. A major point of the Communist movements of the 70s and 80s was to get rid of those corporations. If you deal with actual Latin Americans you will quickly find most of them conflate US Foreign Policy with the policies of [insert appropriate corporate overlord] because from 1900 through the 70s that was true. Most of them will say they think this has changed, and the US is highly unlikely to order the local air force to level the Presidential Palace because some corporate overlord gave the word, but they don't seem to believe it in their hearts.
BTW, you've got my politics 100% wrong.
Just realized my response was only kinda-sorta answering your point, so here's a more direct one:
Argentina could have done fine with some level of protectionism, even a high level of protectionism. The Brazilians of the 80s famously protected themselves out of major parts of the computer revolution until the 90s and they're doing fine.
The problem is the Argentine version of protectionism involves seizing foreign business assets, which means that when the other side wins an election and decides to try to attract foreign investment it has to offer prices only a fool could refuse because only a fool wants to be in business in Argentina when the political landscape shifts again.
Or Venezuela. That oil wealth is more then enough to build a real economy where everyone can participate. In theory there was also no reason that Nicaragua of 1870 couldn't invest in public education and railroads (it is the 1870s after all), and end up richer per capita then damn near anyone.
The problem is a whole suite of interlocking problems, but they all center on a) these countries have intricate US-inspireed political systems that are designed to fail miserably in the absence of near unanimity among the people, and b) their total lack of unanimity on any issue. The US works, for exdample, because for everyone involved a functioning system almost exactly like the one we had last week is much preferable to saying "fuck it, let's shut down the government." Thus the life and death struggles over whether the extremely rich should pay a marginal tax rate of 35% or 39.6%.
For an example of how this system can fail catastrophically, check out the recent i>coup d'tat in Honduras. The Old President repeatedly refused to drop plans for a referendum allowing him to run for a third term, even after the Supreme Court ruled that he could not implement such a referendum. More then once. Legally speaking the Senate had every right to fire him, the New President had every right to order the Army to storm the Presidential Palace, and the Old President had every right to call it a coup d'tat. And literally none of that shit could have happened if they'd had a Constitutional set-up similar to India, South Africa, or Canada. They have no term limits law to fight over, Checks and Balances consist almost entirely of the Court System enforcing the Constitution (with possible residual use of the Head of State's power in extreme circumstances), and the Head of Government is always 100% responsible to the Legislature so there's no need for a coup d'tat like maneuver to get rid of him when he pisses off one House or the other.
In this case one of the issues they are extremely divided on is their nation's relationship with the global economy as represented by foreign (generally US) Corporations. It's simply true that if the region had some political consensus on the issue which allowed the corporations to operate in the country under reasonable legal terms earning a reasonable profit the political instability would have been less poisonous for economic growth. And if there's economic growth it's much easier to maintain political stability, because you can do shit like cut taxes and increase public spending at the same time without going into unsustainable deficits.
OTOH, if half the country is convinced that letting US Fruit have a profit margin lower then 20% will reduce them to pecuniary, and the other half is convinced that USD Fruit's profit margin could easily be seized by a High School educated politician and redistributed to make everyone rich, you're gonna have some pretty big fucking problems. And the political system won;t let you paper them over until they go away.
It's not just Argentina.
In 1900 a significant fraction of of Europe wasn't industrialized. Norway and Finland were relative backwaters, and the Balkans are large enough to be "much of Europe" all by themselves. Chile and Venezuela were all quite wealthy in per capita terms in 1900.
The region as a whole was comparable to Eastern Europe. I suspect that if you broke out Yugoslavia by it's 2014 borders, and split Czechoslovakia, the University of Groenigan's per capita incomes in Eastern Europe would actually be below Latin America.
Apparently you don't know much actual history. In 1900 Latin America was much wealthier per capita then much of Europe. Chile for example, was 16th on this list beating Norway. Argentina was particularly wealthy because in 1900 they all ate meat, and since most of the world hadn't industrialized eating meat made them one of the wealthier states in the world.
According to the University of Gronigen in 1900 Chile, Columbia, Argentina, and Venezuela were all above $2k per capita. Nobody in Eastern Europe was at $2k. In the West Finland, those poor Norwegians, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy were all well below $2k. The total regional income (which is biased towards low numbers because there are a lot of poor states in the Caribbean and Central America) of $1.1-$1.2k is above Yugoslavia and Albania, and comparable to the Bulgarians, Greeks and Portuguese.
So yes, the numbers indicate that in 1900 Latin America was richer per capita then much of Europe.
Pick the hill you want to die on.
In 1900 Latin American was richer per capita then most of Europe. They are no longer richer then most of Europe primarily because most of the region periodically insists on throwing the foreign corporations out. Then after the economy collapses they they are forced to invite the foreigners back in under ridiculously generous terms. Many of the countries (especially the Central American ones and Argentina) have yet to figure out that if you let the foreign companies in under reasonable terms once, things go so much better in the long-term.
Like it or not you don't get a growing economy without large corporations. You clearly have to regulate the shit out of those corporations, but you also have to let them make their 3%-10% profit margin every year or they go away and instead of having a bunch of investment and new jobs you get to be Argentina. In this case google makes money by sponsored results. no sponsored results, means google goes away. Since there are no alternative models for funding a search engine on normal computers (as opposed to Phones, where Apple and co. make enough on the hardware to fund Siri); the EU winning this case means that it will be very difficult to run a search engine in Europe. That's not a smart hill for the EU to die on.
The difficulty google has given Microsoft in getting apps onto Android, OTOH, is a smart one. Google and Android will survive fine if Microsoft has the right to sell it's services on those devices.
The alliance's website is:
http://advertise.bingads.micro...
I tried to link in-post, but apparently my HTML skills are rusty.
Frankly I can't figure out Microsoft's long game on this.
They're alleging that google is breaking EU rules by a) being really big, and b) relying on revenue from sponsored results. If it works this will drive google out of Europe, but it won't help Microsoft because then Bing will become the number one European search engine and 100% of Bing's revenue (which also comes from sponsored results) will be illegal. Pardon me, there's Yahoo, but Yahoo and Bing have an alliance running their sponsored ads through Microsoft.
I suspect they're going for some weird side-deal from google (ie: let us have a Youtube app), but that doesn't seem like a very smart strategy. Google is not the kind of company that gives up to this kind of BS until it really has to, and by the time it really has to it'll be too late.
The exploration as default thing permeates the culture. The Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox if you understand that a) breaking the light barrier may be possible, but will definitely cost a fortune, and b) any single star system has more then enough resources to feed an arbitrarily large number of people. Seriously. Why would we send multiple missions to any given star system in a year if we have everything we need here?
If we're sending like one mission every five years, and only to the very nearest systems, how would the inhabitants of the system tell that our probe/ship/etc. isn't some obscure natural phenomena. And if this is likely to happen to us, why wouldn't it happen to any hypothetical star-faring race close enough to send those probes?
Depends.
I haven't read much non-white SciFi, but a lot of my recent stuff has been set in places that aren't typical for SciFi/fantasy. Alif the Unseen is set in a fictional Gulf Monarchy (and written by a woman), River of Gods is set in a futuristic India. Part of the appeal was that they weren't just a bunch of suburbanites doing the same shit that Heinlein talked about a decade before I was born.
I actually find I have more trouble reading SciFi about countries I'm familiar with because I have more trouble suspending disbelief. No Mr. Author, Congress would not vote to authorize that. Since I have no fucking clue how Pakistan's parliament operates I just can't subject it to the same level of scrutiny.
The white suburban person SciFi that actually grabs tends not to be about technology, but either about military operations (David Weber, Eric Flint, the whole Baen crowd), or exploring fictional alien cultures (authors like CJ Cherryh and Iain M Banks Culture series).
This might be due to the ganging up of the SJWs on the victims. This is what pisses off a large group of people, both conservative and liberal, and generates a large response. If, however, you compare the arshole comments of the SJWs to those attacking them, it's a push.
I've never seen a so-called SJW actually gang up on anyone in particular.
Sometimes you'll see somebody say "this gay/Asian/etc. author did great and you should nominate him for this award," or "Yippee, a black guy finally won an award," but nobody goes out of their way to say any of the individual white guys nominated, or the ones who won in past years sucked. It's pretty much exactly what happens when an author prominent in some unprestigious sub genre of SciFi (say David Weber's Military SF), actually gets nominated for something, or wins. His fans are gonna be happy because their guy won, and they will say so, but they aren't gonna start threads on how the great injustice of last year';s winner has been overturned.
OTOH, the people who think "Social Justice Warriors" exist outside of their own skulls frequently argue that [insert non-white author] sucked and only won an award because he's not white.
"Social justice warrior?"
You mean the people who don't exist outside of your head?
Even the White House can't really force them to do jack-squat. Vietnam, the Iraq War, etc. have all shown that the ability of westerners to influence non-Western societies is quite limited.
The reason the boycott against Indiana worked is that Tim Cook is an American, and he speaks for a lot of people within Indiana's borders. They care what he thinks, they want his business, and they really don't want their opponents within the state to have a) access to Tim Cook money and b) the argument that Indiana's fucked itself over in the business world because Apple' pissed at it.
On the other hand, it's really hard to get other countries to do what we want. Uganda actually likes us, and wants to be like us, and their response to our protests that they were about to pass a law that gave gays the death sentence was change it to life imprisonment while bitching about neo-colonialism and Ugandan values.
Whether it's overblown or not isn't relevant to the question of whether most people (and particularly the ones who are Judges) think it was a good idea.
As for your fears about being declared a terrorist, welcome to fucking America. The Commander-in-Chief clause is specifically designed so you do not have the right to prevent the President from oppressing you. If he thinks he has legitimate Commander-in-Chief reasons to lock you up then you get locked up. He doesn't need a statute, or a Court Order (altho he'd prefer both if he can get them). Your legal remedy is to challenge your detention in Court while you rot in prison. The only penalty you'll receive even if you turn out to be a non-terrorist is compensation, and that will probably take an Act of Congress because the Founders didn't see fit to include anything more automatic in their Constitution.
The reason is that in 1789 a significant proportion of the population were still loyal to the British Crown. 4% of them actually fled to Canada, and form the basis of the Anglophone Canadian community. They did not want some guy with undying loyalty to the King and a keg of gunpowder to have Constitutional rights, therefore they specifically designed the Constitution so the President could circumvent his rights. The Checks are that a) Commander-in-Chief powers are ad hoc, so that after the threat is passed our gunpowder toting Tory gets free, and b) the Tory can appeal to the ordinary Courts claiming he's not evil and the Commander-in-Chief powers don't apply to him. Which is a completely different design principle then the rest of the Constitution.