this has been an exercise in denying someone their inalienable right to participate in the political process.
Except that having a job as CEO of a company is not a requirement to participating in the political process. I am not denied my right to participate in politics if my wife threatens to divorce me if I donate to prop 8.
I don;t know why you think a job as a CEO is an inalienable right. Maybe you are just an idiot.
and if I ever get a CEO position I'll quickly be removed--like Brendan--for trying to destroy America.
I think you will get removed because you are an idiot.
So this mafia of vicious activists has a direct negative impact on my ability to participate in the political process for the good of society. Now society is weaker. These people have done more harm than we could ever pretend Brendan Eich would.
OMG the activists are a "mafia" now? You're such a whiny little baby. Grow the fuck up.
You're like a child who won't play a game unless he has an unfair advantage. If you are too much of a pussy to actually participate in the political system (e.g. being criticized, boycotted, fired, etc), maybe you should just retreat. Other people have participated in the political system under threat of torture and death to fight for equal rights. You are whining about a bigot CEO being pressured to resign. Boo fucking hoo. I am done tallking to you.
And again I can use your logic to show that banning sex with children or animals is bigotry.
As I said there is a valid reason to ban having sex with children (because it creates a victim). I don't know if you remember, but I agreed that banning sex with animals was a form of bigotry if you did not believe animals have rights.
There is not a valid reason to ban same sex marriage. There are many stupid and irrational reasons for banning gay marriage, (some of which you cited). The fact that you can think of a stupid reason to take rights away from people doesn't mean that it's not bigotry.
I have simply done the same work over using your statements as the source information, deriving an implied meaning for bigotry which falls outside the scope of the established definition of bigotry.
Except you have bad reading comprehension and you can't make proper logical deductions, which is why you arrive at at the wrong conclusions.
Some people feel black people are more criminals by nature. So fighting to remove them from society is the morally correct thing for them to do.
Some people feel allowing Brandan Eich to be CEO of Mozilla is harmful to the company. So fighting to have him removed is the morally correct thing to do.
You don't get to say what my definition of bigotry is.
If someone says "I love black people, and I don't want anything bad to happen to them, I just don't think it is good for society to let them work in banks because it is in the nature of black people make them more likely to be thieves." This is still bigotry.
It is prejudiced to think black people working in banks harms society.
It is prejudiced to think gay marriage harms society.
The fear that black people people will steal from you is bigotry.
The fear that gay marriage will cause children to be exposed to sexuality is bigotry.
Brendan Eich has always been supportive of people. He has been unsupportive of socio-government institutions which he believed would be harmful to people. Those beliefs may be incorrect, but they are not bigotry.
If I were going to be a douchebag and put words in your mouth here is what I would say:
Here is what you think: If someone believes black people are by their nature/genetics criminals, they may be incorrect but they are not bigots because they don't fear black people. They don't fear black people. They just fear the results of allowing black people the same opportunities like jobs in banks.
The fact is that you can turn every instance of bigotry into a rational deductive position based on a false premise.
Show me any example of bigotry, and I can show you how it isn't bigotry by your own logic.
Except that it didn't, his gay coworkers would have never picked up on it because he's treated them fairly and by their ability to do the job (why some of them were so surprised).
You don't know that he's treated every one of his coworkers fairly.
This comes to separating personal views and business. You're assuming he can't, when it's quite clear he can considering what his gay coworkers have said about him.
I am not assuming he can't. I am saying that it would not be surprising if he can't especially now. This isn't a court of law where you need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he has or will discriminate against gay subordinates. It's a business. And it is up to the people who hired him to decide if they want to continue to keep him on as CEO given this new information and the risk that it poses to the company.
When Eich resigned, he did it for the good of the company. It's not a question about whether he deserved to lose his job. It's a question of whether key people (Eich and the board) feel like Eich is still the best person for the job especially considering this recent controversy.
It shouldn't matter what his views are so long as it does not affect how he does his work/manages people. Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
It clearly does. His views created a lot of dissent within the ranks. Should those people be able to get over it if Eich is otherwise doing a good job? Maybe, but it's a large company and the fact is that a lot people just were not going to be happy with him as CEO, and this lowered morale affects his ability to be an effective leader. Maybe it's not fair. Life is not fair.
Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
It doesn't matter if he did or didn't. If someone discovered that some CEO had written a bunch books under a pseudonym that suggested black people had a criminal nature or something like that, you wouldn't have to prove that he had ever discriminated against black people, for the damage to be done. He may have been completely fair to black people while secretly believing they were all much more likely to be criminals. The fact that a large percentage of qualified people feel uncomfortable working under this person is reason enough to replace him.
If you criticize the idea as bigotry, you are implicitly calling the man that advocates the idea a bigot.
That a person holds ideas you dislike in one area should not affect his work in a totally unrelated area.
Often it doesn't. Occasionally it does. For example if one of your ideas is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married, it affects your ability to be an effective leader of a diverse group for the same reason that "believing black people are criminals" would. I'm sure his bigoted ideas do not affect his abilities as a software engineer.
To do so is holding people to criteria not relevant to the task, what a lot of people tend to consider "unfair discrimination".
The unfair discrimination is denying equal protection under the law provided by the 14th amendment to gay people. Even though Eich resigned, firing him would have been fair discrimination considering he was not going to be able to do his job (which he apparently agrees with given his resignation).
Chances are you knew the intent, purposefully misconstruing things to paint a different picture than intended can be a bit straw-man'ish.
Obviously I knew the intent...
It's unhealthy to society for people who hold opposing views to be crucified. It's uncivil and counter-productive.
If we are talking about the 2nd (i.e. benign definition) of "crucify", I would say that it is essential to a functioning democracy that ideas and people who espouse those ideas are criticized. It was important that the advocates of slavery were "crucified". It was important that the advocates of segregation and the opponents of women's suffrage were "crucified".
Associative meaning is a thing
Yes, but when it is used to exaggerate the severity of things, it's important to draw attention to what the reality is.
So you are using a definition of bigotry that is not a part of the English language. I could call a large feline with stripes a dog as well. Or I could call you a pedophile for using computers.
No I am leaving the definition the same. You are the one that is trying to redefine what fear is.
And that makes it right for us to publicly bash companies for having gay people, until they fire those gay people, such that gay people are not capable of participating in society in the same way as not-gay people?
You keep saying that being fired is the same as not being able to participate in society. I keep saying I don't agree. The constitution guarantees that the government will treat you equally regardless of your race, gender, and sexual preference, not that other members of society will.
People are have the right to do things certain things that are "wrong". People can protest with signs that say "God hates fags". People can support prop8. People can call for all bigots to be fired.
Furthermore, while I think you should have the right to hire and fire whoever you want, I don't think that "firing someone for being gay" and "firing someone who is anti-gay" are morally equivalent for the same reason that I don't think that "firing a holocaust advocate", and a "firing a holocaust opponent" are morally equivalent. They are similar in every respect except that the holocaust was bad. Supporting bigotry is bad, and opposing bigotry is good.
I would say "firing someone who supported prop 8" is morally equivalent to "firing someone who supported banning marriage for straight people".
The majority of people do not accept that homosexual marriage and homosexuality constitutes anymore of an exposure of sexuality to children than heterosexual marriage and heterosexuality.
This is like calling a fear of a society where we tax the rich at 100% and redistribute their wealth to the less fortunate "bigotry" against the poor.
I would like to point out that your socio-economic status is not immutable in the same way that race, gender, and sexual preference are. Secondly, the fear of living in a communist society is the fear of communism/communists (i.e. a political ideology). Depending on the time and place, this fear may have been justified or not. Saying "I don't want to live in a communist society" is not bigoted. Saying "I don't want to live in a society with black people" is. Saying "I don't want to live in a society where gay people can be married" is. Why is it bigoted? Because this fear is completely irrational. Other people being gay does not actually affect you. Communism certainly affects you. I know you are arguing that they think homosexuality does cause harm, but they are wrong, and that's what makes them bigots.
If Safeway hired a gay CEO, millions of religious conservatives might clamor to protest Safeway's pollution of good Christian family values. Shop Gay, Shop Safeway. They may cry for a boycott. Then we could remove the CEO for being "bad for the company"--essentially, for being gay. This would be the same issue as removing Eich from his position at Mozilla Inc for his political view.
It would be the owners of the store deciding to remove the CEO under pressure from their customers. The owners of the store should be free to have as their CEO whoever they want. They can listen to public outrage or ignore it. They can make good business decisions or decide to take a moral stand. This is what freedom is. This is the right to free association.
I already told you: people think this will lead to more exposure of sexuality to children, among other social changes, and that this is accepted as bad for society.
I am not debating that some people have accepted this. As "widely accepted" as this view may be, the majority of people do not accept this. If you are going to treat a minority viewpoint as "accepted", then we can say "it is accepted that vaccines cause autism".
It's unhealthy to society for people who hold opposing views to be crucified. It's uncivil and counter-productive.
Yes it is quite uncivil to murder people by nailing them to a cross. It's a good thing that nobody was crucified.
Tolerance doesn't mean tolerating only those who tolerate you. Tolerance means also tolerating those who don't tolerate you.
I don't see anyone trying to ban marriage for bigots, or have them arrested, or suspend their first amendment rights.
Everyone gets their (thorough) say before society as a whole decides what to do, and the losers (usually the minority, though in Prop 8's case it was the majority) agree to live with the outcome without resorting to violence, while the winners do not resort to outbursts of Schadenfreude.
Actually the agreement is that nobody is allowed to commit violence and everybody is allowed to say whatever they want regardless of what "side" they are on (if any) and regardless of which side wins.
Skin-heads aren't bad because they think Jews and blacks are inferior and bad for society. They're bad because they think this justifies eliminating Jews and blacks from society - removing their influence from the socio-political fabric which makes up our society.
Skin heads are bad for both reasons. Their freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the constitution. They are free to campaign for their agenda as much as they want, they are just not allowed to violate any laws (e.g. assaulting people), just as Eich is free to push his agenda to ban gay marriage, and other people are free to be outraged.
What happened to Eich was a lynch mob-like naming and shaming.
Lynch mobs didn't just name and shame people. They murdered people. I think this comparison trivializes the crimes committed by actual lynch mobs.
The whole reason we came up with formal government systems was because at some point we decided gossip and hearsay were a poor means to run society.
This is not how I would characterize the motivation for why governments form.
As opposed to everything you have said which has been pretty equally stupid. I am fairly convinced that you know essentially nothing about chaos theory or physics in general. So I I am not going to respond to those paragraphs.
The situation I described is not bigotry. Bigotry requires treating other people with fear, distrust, and hatred. Other *people*. Deciding that society is better without a specific social institution is not bigotry, and can be done without being fearful, distrusting, or hateful toward people who have a stake in such an institution.
As in they fear a society where homosexuals are allowed to freely practice their homosexuality and where children will be influenced by these homosexuals into becoming homosexuals themselves. Like I said... bigotry.
For example: we do not allow sex with small children; however, some people are exclusively attracted to people around 9 years old, or to young teens (12-15). In Europe, they treat these people with psychological counseling and give them libido suppressing drugs: instead of hating and attacking them, they consider them unfortunate and provide them with treatment, attempting to help them to integrate with society.
And I to consider them to have an unfortunate condition and pity them. If expressing this condition did not constitute victimizing kids in most situations, I would have no problem with it. For example, I don't care if pedophiles have sex with non-sentient robots that look like children to satisfy their urges. Seeing as how homosexual relationship between adults victimizes nobody, therefore this comparison is not the same.
Eich appears to have decided we should not legally recognize homosexual marriage, but not decided to attack homosexual people.
He is not physically attacking them. He is advocating that they not be given equal rights as other people. He is attacking them on a social level.
That's not bigotry; that's tolerance. He believes that particular aspect of a person's behavior is incorrect or harmful to society, but tolerates these people.
It's not tolerance to advocate for segregation but not slavery. That's just less severe bigotry. And Eich is a less severe bigot than someone who advocates slavery. He is pretty much equally bigoted as someone who advocates segregation or banning biracial marriage. You don't magically become "not a bigot" by simply being less bigoted than someone else.
On the other hand, we are not tolerant: we don't see this as a problem. If we "tolerated" this stuff, it would be because we find it something distasteful that we need to actively allow for.
If you are saying I am more than tolerant (or "at least tolerant") of gay people I would agree. I don't dislike (and therefore am not forced to "tolerate") that other people engage in it. I am however tolerant of bigots like Eich. I tolerate his bigotry, in the sense that I am not advocated that he be imprisoned or have his freedom of speech removed. I feel people should have the right to be bigots. What NOBODY has the right to is to force other people into mutual relationships (like employment, friendship, marriage, customer/vendor, etc). I am free to try to convince an employer to fire an employee, or convince an employee to quit their job, or to convince a consumer to boycott a vendor, or convince a husband to leave a wife. Ultimately each person is responsible for their own decisions to start, continue, or end mutual relationships, based on whatever advice they find convincing.
The only entity that is not allowed the right to free association is the government. The government must treat everyone equally. This is the contract we as US citizens have with the government.
There's a real lack of information there though. There is real lack of knowledge of how things will change, with a real high-probability that some social changes of a known model will occur. There is also an accepted ideal that such changes are harmful--it may be incorrect, but it's accepted. That makes these considerations valid. It is, effectively, an expression of a low risk appetite.
Accepted by whom? "It's accepted" (i.e. by someone) really doesn't mean anything. This is what I am talking about when I say the bans on same sex marriage have very vague justifications. Nobody can define exactly what it is that their worried will happen. It's always some kind of "tearing of the social fabric", or "loss of family values". If we allow gay marriage and anything bad happens, the predictions are so vague that they can be attributed after the fact like the predictions of Nostradamus.
I am citing sociology, morality (morals aren't based on what's actually right and wrong, but rather cultural perception of such), risk management, and chaos theory in these analyses. Chaos theory particularly states that everything is deterministic, but that sufficient flux exists due to minor details, and that we have imperfect knowledge which correlates to what is perceived as "randomness". People naturally act with consideration to this via a fear of the unknown and a tendency to notice when something may make far-reaching, unpredictable changes.
And yet you are not advocating banning butterflies from flapping their wings...
I don't believe the correct way to handle his opposing view is to beat him with a cudgel until he reluctantly accepts that society is following a wrong-headed path and pretends to play along.
Nobody is handling it this way or advocating handling it this way in a literal sense. In a metaphorical sense, "bet him with a cudgel" can mean anything including criticism and social pressure.
Either allow him to keep his views but push through the opposition of him and others like him, or retain a strong society throughout the change and help him to understand and accept it. Punishment is for people who commit crimes, not people who are harmlessly ignorant.
He hasn't committed any crimes and he is not being punished. Only the government has the power to truly punish people. My wife can "punish" me, but only because I choose to stay married to her. She doesn't have any power to punish me if I decide I don't need her approval.
Brendan Eich was never entitled to his job as CEO of Mozilla. It was always contingent upon 2 things: the continued willingness of Eich to want to be CEO and the continued willingness of the board to want him as CEO. As soon as either of these conditions is false, neither side has the power to compel the other.
And that is a valid position; however, you are holding the position that Eich deserves this punishment for his views, not that he is being treated unfairly and that the best option for everyone is for him to accept this unfair situation and step down. While this makes business sense, it doesn't make ethical sense: we are claiming Eich deserves this treatment because his views differ from ours in some way.
I don't know why I have to keep repeating myself, but no I don't think Bredan Eich deserves to be punished for his views. I believe he is responsible for his views which is different than punishment. As I have said at least 10 times already, I think his personal views prevent him from being effective at his job, and I think the decision to fire him (had he not resigned) would be perfectly appropriate.
While this makes business sense, it doesn't make ethical sense: we are claiming Eich deserves this treatment because his views differ from ours in some way.
It is not unethical to fire people. He is not "getting the treatment he deserves". As a sof
We do have people who are gay and there is absolutely no way to de-gay them; but then we also have people who are curious, bisexual, or who were gay in high school and then halfway through college became bi or just abandoned gay stuff altogether, or who identify as "straight" but still engage in gay sexual behaviors as a diversion (i.e. to get off, or for whatever reason), and so on.
So what? It's quite obvious that human sexuality is not binary. It's a spectrum or several spectra. The fact that some people are bisexual or curious does not mean they are deciding what their sexual preferences are.
Because of this, some people develop the valid opinion that we don't want to create this social shift in society.
Exactly what makes this opinion valid other than the fact that you are free to have whatever opinion you want? To me this is like saying "Some people have the valid opinion that black people should be slaves". Yes it's valid in the sense that it is protected by the first amendment (along with every opinion) and that's pretty much it.
This is not necessarily wrong-headed thinking: they have a concern, it may not be valid, but it is as they understand the world and so they want to protect it from this estimated damage. There's even enough logical argument to say they have a fair, reasonable probability of being right;
If this isn't wrong-headed thinking, then I don't know what is. This is subjective. They prefer a puritanical world and see sexual liberation as "damage". They see anything that deviates from their christian world view as damage. I see lack of freedom as damage. Luckily for me this is the United States and not Saudi Arabia and our constitution values freedom over tradition and family values. If people want to restrict freedom in order to preserve their traditions, they should first focus on dismantling the constitution, or consider trying to convert Saudi Arabia to Christianity and moving there.
Is it bad that children will have greater exposure to sexual behavior in society?
I don't agree that homosexuality causes children to be exposed to sexual behavior any more than heterosexuality does. Furthermore I think the puritanical approach of preventing sexuality through shame is more destructive than the sexuality it is trying to prevent.
Is this really a difficult concept?
No it's not difficult. I think it's based on false premises, faulty logic, and it assumes a different set of morals than what I espouse and what the constitution provides.
It didn't start with "Some Mozilla Inc employees have voiced these concerns, and we support them..."
Actually that's exactly how it started. The OK cupid stunt came afterwards.
It grew into a bunch of whining on forums. Mozilla employees have posted on here stating that they find this whole situation disgusting and that they have nothing against Brendan.
It's easy to call what other people do, whining. I could call what you are doing whining. But this kind of characterization is pretty childish. And I don't doubt that some mozilla employees support Eich, but it is clear that many don't. I would say keeping a CEO that polarizes other employees and customers is a bad idea from a business perspective.
Do you remember the 60s? When having the political view of a "Communist" would get you arrested, or banned from employment, or what have you? Do you realize that many of our "enlightened" policies are tied to that--much of our current liberal-democrat politics is stuff that would get you strung up several decades ago. Obama should be executed for treason for supporting the ACA. Is that the world you want to live in? Is that America?
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Obama or the ACA. I noticed you lumped "getting arrested" with "b
You purported that something has no negative effects;
None that are significant.
I purported that this is not necessarily true, from some standpoint.
It can probably be shown that it is not necessarily true that there are no negative effects of heterosexual marriage either. Surely an institution as widespread as marriage can't possibly have zero negative effects. My point would be that these negative effects are not significant relative to other negative effects if marriage were outlawed for heterosexual people.
You have no sense of subtlety.
It's not that I don't see the subtlety in your arguments. I just think your arguments aren't very good, and I choose not to reply to the parts that I find irrelevant.
If I say there are no negative effects of shoes, therefore it should be legal for people to buy and sell shoes. You come along and find some relatively insignificant way in which shoes are hurting society (e.g. more people are getting sprained ankles when they run without shoes), and I must now correct myself that there are no negative effects significant enough to warrant making shoes illegal. And then you get all offended that I didn't appreciate your argument. Sorry, I just think it's a stupid argument.
Eich's behavior leads me to believe that he feels gay marriage is somehow wrong--that it's not a thing our society should support--but that he harbors no aggression or ill will toward any individual.
Replace "gay" with "black". Has anything really changed?
He has not apologized for supporting Proposition 8 because, I would guess, he believes it was the right thing to do; but he also has supported individuals who are gay, has provided for them to not be treated differently than any other individuals, to be denied anything for being gay, because he appears to believe that this is also the right thing to do. You can't marry another person of the same sex; but you also can't be denied a job or pushed out of a social group or beaten to death for wanting to do exactly that.
I'm sure many people supported segregation in the south despite being opposed to the slavery from a century earlier.
The short version is, again, that I don't like the idea of not being able to participate in the political system because people don't agree with you.
And nothing like that is happening in the USA.
If we voted in an overwhelming proposition with 92% support for putting all jews in concentration camps and working them to death, that wouldn't happen because the courts would claim the entire country is nuts and we're not allowed to do that.
Would voting for something like this be considered "participating in the political system"? Don't you think people that vote for things like this should be held responsible for their views? I sure as hell don't want to hire someone if I found out they voted for the holocaust.
And here we've had Eich forced out of society, in some small part. He's not allowed to be CEO of Mozilla Inc, by rule of what a bunch of assholes on the Internet have to say about it.
Getting fired from a job is being forced out of society? As the board of Mozilla you are morally required to hire Brendan Eich (and not fire him) as your CEO? It is not just people on the internet. It was other Mozilla employees that started calling for his resignation.
I am all for freedom of speech. I am all for equal protection under the law. Since when is "being denied a job" a violation of your rights?
Through defensive design. By requiring that system design promotes safety; therefore, there are unlikely to be serious safety issues. The key is to design systems that are anti-fragile, AND that are robust such that random safety issues aren't emerging after product release.
This is an example of things never becoming issues in the first place. And you cannot rely on the fact that you will simply have a 100% perfect design from the start and not worry about any issues that pop up after release. So I will reiterate, that it is reasonable to fix the issues that pop up after release as you discover them.
This is not a valid excuse for designing and releasing or using systems with inherent vulnerabilities that are therefore likely to have safety impacting issues later, and therefore: incurring this extra liability.
Obviously I was not advocating designing systems with inherent vulnerabilities.
Most people drive their car less than 2 hours a day, BUT rely on their smoke detector to help protect their lives 10+ hours a day.
And even given this fact, there are 14x as many people dying in car accidents as in house fires.
This assumes you are an average driver. But perhaps I am a far-safer-than-average driver driving a far-safer-than-average car.
It also assumes you are an average home owner. Perhaps I am extra safe when it comes to making sure my electrical work is up to code and I never leave the stove unattended.
You claim to have calculated risks which are actually impossible for you to have calculated, which is the reason, that I know your claim about the relative likelihood is definitely false (That which cannot be true due to an absolute condition, is guaranteed to be false.).
So what you are saying is that unless I have calculated the risk with absolute accuracy, I can not do a proper risk/benefit analysis, I am supposed to just assume it is as deadly as anything can be?
The Idea "I want my house to be nice and toasty when I come home; even if there is this substantial chance that some Chinese hacker can kill me"; is a bit of a depraved notion.
And yet this has literally never happened. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I don't think it's reasonable to be so worried about something that is so rare, that not only do I know of any cases, I can't even find any cases of it happening on the internet.
The fact is it's not possible to calculate the "risk" part of risk/reward. The fact is any danger of incalculable risk is not worth it, if the danger is great enough. The reward has to be such that: the absence of the reward is as bad or nearly as bad as the maximum potential negative impact of potential hazards that may exist.
Bullshit. You can't calculate risks with absolute accuracy either. You're just estimating like I am. Pretending you know which risks are incalculable and which risks are calculable, and exactly what they are, doesn't make you any more safe. At least I am honest that I don't know, and I am just making an estimate about the level of risk for everything in my life.
No... it's not a reasonable course of action. When safety issues are "discovered" the hard way, lives are lost.
I'm not sure how you think safety problems could be fixed *before* they are discovered. Not only is fixing safety problems *after* they are discovered reasonable, it's really the only possibility. How soon you fix these issues after they are discovered is what makes the difference.
It is a true, but a useless fact that nothing is 100% safe.
It is useful to people who refrain from doing certain things they might benefit from because they are *not* 100% safe. Sometimes people need to be reminded that nothing is 100% safe, and that everything entails a risk.
Do you really think you can compare the "safety" of Driving to Work, against the "safety" of connecting a thermostat or smoke detector to the internet?
I already did. And in fact lots of people die everyday driving to work. I am not aware of a single case of someone dying due to their thermostat or smoke detector being hooked up to the internet. One might say the reason these 2 things are not comparable is that driving to work is much more dangerous. I however recognize that there is risk with both.
Traditional smoke detectors are highly reliable life protecting devices. Making them microprocessor-controlled and wiring up to the internet transforms the detector from a robust device you should be able to bet your life on, even during the apocalypse -- come hell or high water, into this fragile piece where one misplaced line of code, or one n'er'do'well who hacked in --- can put your life at risk: due to reliance on a safety device that doesn't work.
Well I hope you don't drive a car made in the last 10 years. Those are controlled by microprocessors too.
It's an unequal tradeoff in the first place: so you drive to work. The "next best thing" to driving to work, is likely to have tremendously greater cost, or force you to move house.
You are about 14 times as likely to die in a car accident as a house fire. Every day you drive a car is as dangerous as going 14 days without any smoke detector at all. You've made a calculated risk to drive your car. I have made a calculated risk to connect my thermostat and smoke detector the internet. Maybe I will die in a fire and you can say "I told you so". Maybe you will die in a car accident and I can say "I told you so". It's all about balancing risk vs. reward. I want my house nice and toasty when I come home.
Driving drunk is still more convenient than calling a cab or bugging a friend. Driving drunk will never be 100% secure.
I guess it could be depending on how drunk you are. If you are so drunk that the likelihood of killing other people or yourself is significant than those sorts of consequences make things decidedly less convenient (given that death is pretty inconvenient).
Non-Falsifiable statements convey no useful information. I can respond to any mishap or failure with the same verbiage and have no more or less a valid point.
When I say "A is possible" it does not imply "A always happens"
What I am advocating is to use judgement rather than an absolute rule to accept no risk, or extreme risk, which you did not seem to understand.
Falsifiable claims (i.e. scientific/empirical claims) are not the only statements that convey useful information. Logical arguments (which is what I was making), do not need to be falsifiable.
I could say "If all unicorns are purple, then if you find a unicorn, it will be purple". That's not really a falsifiable claim. There is no experiment you could (or should do) to verify this. It's a logical claim.
Maybe you just learned the term "falsifiable", if so I will offer you some advice that you are using it wrong.
Whether it is "driving drunk" or "driving sober to work" neither activity is 100% secure.
So now all the people who think driving drunk is safe can stop worrying about things that are not as dangerous as drunk driving.
The hell it is. If a fire starts when your away chances are your still looking at significant/total loss from fire and or water damage from efforts to stop the fire.. by time monitoring company farts around with your contact list, finally calls the fire department and fire department arrives.
I didn't say that the benefit was immense. I said it outweighed the risk of hacking.
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I didn't know narrow passages of water connecting two seas or two large areas of water had a race or gender.
Thats true. That's why everyone has both a husband and a wife.
this has been an exercise in denying someone their inalienable right to participate in the political process.
Except that having a job as CEO of a company is not a requirement to participating in the political process. I am not denied my right to participate in politics if my wife threatens to divorce me if I donate to prop 8.
I don;t know why you think a job as a CEO is an inalienable right. Maybe you are just an idiot.
and if I ever get a CEO position I'll quickly be removed--like Brendan--for trying to destroy America.
I think you will get removed because you are an idiot.
So this mafia of vicious activists has a direct negative impact on my ability to participate in the political process for the good of society. Now society is weaker. These people have done more harm than we could ever pretend Brendan Eich would.
OMG the activists are a "mafia" now? You're such a whiny little baby. Grow the fuck up.
You're like a child who won't play a game unless he has an unfair advantage. If you are too much of a pussy to actually participate in the political system (e.g. being criticized, boycotted, fired, etc), maybe you should just retreat. Other people have participated in the political system under threat of torture and death to fight for equal rights. You are whining about a bigot CEO being pressured to resign. Boo fucking hoo. I am done tallking to you.
And again I can use your logic to show that banning sex with children or animals is bigotry.
As I said there is a valid reason to ban having sex with children (because it creates a victim). I don't know if you remember, but I agreed that banning sex with animals was a form of bigotry if you did not believe animals have rights.
There is not a valid reason to ban same sex marriage. There are many stupid and irrational reasons for banning gay marriage, (some of which you cited). The fact that you can think of a stupid reason to take rights away from people doesn't mean that it's not bigotry.
I have simply done the same work over using your statements as the source information, deriving an implied meaning for bigotry which falls outside the scope of the established definition of bigotry.
Except you have bad reading comprehension and you can't make proper logical deductions, which is why you arrive at at the wrong conclusions.
Some people feel black people are more criminals by nature. So fighting to remove them from society is the morally correct thing for them to do.
Some people feel allowing Brandan Eich to be CEO of Mozilla is harmful to the company. So fighting to have him removed is the morally correct thing to do.
You can literally do this with any position.
Here are your working definitions of bigotry:
You don't get to say what my definition of bigotry is.
If someone says "I love black people, and I don't want anything bad to happen to them, I just don't think it is good for society to let them work in banks because it is in the nature of black people make them more likely to be thieves." This is still bigotry.
It is prejudiced to think black people working in banks harms society.
It is prejudiced to think gay marriage harms society.
The fear that black people people will steal from you is bigotry.
The fear that gay marriage will cause children to be exposed to sexuality is bigotry.
Brendan Eich has always been supportive of people. He has been unsupportive of socio-government institutions which he believed would be harmful to people. Those beliefs may be incorrect, but they are not bigotry.
If I were going to be a douchebag and put words in your mouth here is what I would say:
Here is what you think: If someone believes black people are by their nature/genetics criminals, they may be incorrect but they are not bigots because they don't fear black people. They don't fear black people. They just fear the results of allowing black people the same opportunities like jobs in banks.
The fact is that you can turn every instance of bigotry into a rational deductive position based on a false premise.
Show me any example of bigotry, and I can show you how it isn't bigotry by your own logic.
Except that it didn't, his gay coworkers would have never picked up on it because he's treated them fairly and by their ability to do the job (why some of them were so surprised).
You don't know that he's treated every one of his coworkers fairly.
This comes to separating personal views and business. You're assuming he can't, when it's quite clear he can considering what his gay coworkers have said about him.
I am not assuming he can't. I am saying that it would not be surprising if he can't especially now. This isn't a court of law where you need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he has or will discriminate against gay subordinates. It's a business. And it is up to the people who hired him to decide if they want to continue to keep him on as CEO given this new information and the risk that it poses to the company.
When Eich resigned, he did it for the good of the company. It's not a question about whether he deserved to lose his job. It's a question of whether key people (Eich and the board) feel like Eich is still the best person for the job especially considering this recent controversy.
It shouldn't matter what his views are so long as it does not affect how he does his work/manages people. Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
It clearly does. His views created a lot of dissent within the ranks. Should those people be able to get over it if Eich is otherwise doing a good job? Maybe, but it's a large company and the fact is that a lot people just were not going to be happy with him as CEO, and this lowered morale affects his ability to be an effective leader. Maybe it's not fair. Life is not fair.
Show me evidence he treated gays differently at work and it will be a different story.
It doesn't matter if he did or didn't. If someone discovered that some CEO had written a bunch books under a pseudonym that suggested black people had a criminal nature or something like that, you wouldn't have to prove that he had ever discriminated against black people, for the damage to be done. He may have been completely fair to black people while secretly believing they were all much more likely to be criminals. The fact that a large percentage of qualified people feel uncomfortable working under this person is reason enough to replace him.
You criticise the idea, not the man though.
If you criticize the idea as bigotry, you are implicitly calling the man that advocates the idea a bigot.
That a person holds ideas you dislike in one area should not affect his work in a totally unrelated area.
Often it doesn't. Occasionally it does. For example if one of your ideas is that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married, it affects your ability to be an effective leader of a diverse group for the same reason that "believing black people are criminals" would. I'm sure his bigoted ideas do not affect his abilities as a software engineer.
To do so is holding people to criteria not relevant to the task, what a lot of people tend to consider "unfair discrimination".
The unfair discrimination is denying equal protection under the law provided by the 14th amendment to gay people. Even though Eich resigned, firing him would have been fair discrimination considering he was not going to be able to do his job (which he apparently agrees with given his resignation).
Chances are you knew the intent, purposefully misconstruing things to paint a different picture than intended can be a bit straw-man'ish.
Obviously I knew the intent...
It's unhealthy to society for people who hold opposing views to be crucified. It's uncivil and counter-productive.
If we are talking about the 2nd (i.e. benign definition) of "crucify", I would say that it is essential to a functioning democracy that ideas and people who espouse those ideas are criticized. It was important that the advocates of slavery were "crucified". It was important that the advocates of segregation and the opponents of women's suffrage were "crucified".
Associative meaning is a thing
Yes, but when it is used to exaggerate the severity of things, it's important to draw attention to what the reality is.
So you are using a definition of bigotry that is not a part of the English language. I could call a large feline with stripes a dog as well. Or I could call you a pedophile for using computers.
No I am leaving the definition the same. You are the one that is trying to redefine what fear is.
And that makes it right for us to publicly bash companies for having gay people, until they fire those gay people, such that gay people are not capable of participating in society in the same way as not-gay people?
You keep saying that being fired is the same as not being able to participate in society. I keep saying I don't agree. The constitution guarantees that the government will treat you equally regardless of your race, gender, and sexual preference, not that other members of society will.
People are have the right to do things certain things that are "wrong". People can protest with signs that say "God hates fags". People can support prop8. People can call for all bigots to be fired.
Furthermore, while I think you should have the right to hire and fire whoever you want, I don't think that "firing someone for being gay" and "firing someone who is anti-gay" are morally equivalent for the same reason that I don't think that "firing a holocaust advocate", and a "firing a holocaust opponent" are morally equivalent. They are similar in every respect except that the holocaust was bad. Supporting bigotry is bad, and opposing bigotry is good.
I would say "firing someone who supported prop 8" is morally equivalent to "firing someone who supported banning marriage for straight people".
The majority of people do not accept that homosexual marriage and homosexuality constitutes anymore of an exposure of sexuality to children than heterosexual marriage and heterosexuality.
This is like calling a fear of a society where we tax the rich at 100% and redistribute their wealth to the less fortunate "bigotry" against the poor.
I would like to point out that your socio-economic status is not immutable in the same way that race, gender, and sexual preference are. Secondly, the fear of living in a communist society is the fear of communism/communists (i.e. a political ideology). Depending on the time and place, this fear may have been justified or not. Saying "I don't want to live in a communist society" is not bigoted. Saying "I don't want to live in a society with black people" is. Saying "I don't want to live in a society where gay people can be married" is. Why is it bigoted? Because this fear is completely irrational. Other people being gay does not actually affect you. Communism certainly affects you. I know you are arguing that they think homosexuality does cause harm, but they are wrong, and that's what makes them bigots.
If Safeway hired a gay CEO, millions of religious conservatives might clamor to protest Safeway's pollution of good Christian family values. Shop Gay, Shop Safeway. They may cry for a boycott. Then we could remove the CEO for being "bad for the company"--essentially, for being gay. This would be the same issue as removing Eich from his position at Mozilla Inc for his political view.
It would be the owners of the store deciding to remove the CEO under pressure from their customers. The owners of the store should be free to have as their CEO whoever they want. They can listen to public outrage or ignore it. They can make good business decisions or decide to take a moral stand. This is what freedom is. This is the right to free association.
I already told you: people think this will lead to more exposure of sexuality to children, among other social changes, and that this is accepted as bad for society.
I am not debating that some people have accepted this. As "widely accepted" as this view may be, the majority of people do not accept this. If you are going to treat a minority viewpoint as "accepted", then we can say "it is accepted that vaccines cause autism".
It's unhealthy to society for people who hold opposing views to be crucified. It's uncivil and counter-productive.
Yes it is quite uncivil to murder people by nailing them to a cross. It's a good thing that nobody was crucified.
Tolerance doesn't mean tolerating only those who tolerate you. Tolerance means also tolerating those who don't tolerate you.
I don't see anyone trying to ban marriage for bigots, or have them arrested, or suspend their first amendment rights.
Everyone gets their (thorough) say before society as a whole decides what to do, and the losers (usually the minority, though in Prop 8's case it was the majority) agree to live with the outcome without resorting to violence, while the winners do not resort to outbursts of Schadenfreude.
Actually the agreement is that nobody is allowed to commit violence and everybody is allowed to say whatever they want regardless of what "side" they are on (if any) and regardless of which side wins.
Skin-heads aren't bad because they think Jews and blacks are inferior and bad for society. They're bad because they think this justifies eliminating Jews and blacks from society - removing their influence from the socio-political fabric which makes up our society.
Skin heads are bad for both reasons. Their freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the constitution. They are free to campaign for their agenda as much as they want, they are just not allowed to violate any laws (e.g. assaulting people), just as Eich is free to push his agenda to ban gay marriage, and other people are free to be outraged.
What happened to Eich was a lynch mob-like naming and shaming.
Lynch mobs didn't just name and shame people. They murdered people. I think this comparison trivializes the crimes committed by actual lynch mobs.
The whole reason we came up with formal government systems was because at some point we decided gossip and hearsay were a poor means to run society.
This is not how I would characterize the motivation for why governments form.
That's the stupidest thing you've said yet.
As opposed to everything you have said which has been pretty equally stupid. I am fairly convinced that you know essentially nothing about chaos theory or physics in general. So I I am not going to respond to those paragraphs.
The situation I described is not bigotry. Bigotry requires treating other people with fear, distrust, and hatred. Other *people*. Deciding that society is better without a specific social institution is not bigotry, and can be done without being fearful, distrusting, or hateful toward people who have a stake in such an institution.
As in they fear a society where homosexuals are allowed to freely practice their homosexuality and where children will be influenced by these homosexuals into becoming homosexuals themselves. Like I said... bigotry.
For example: we do not allow sex with small children; however, some people are exclusively attracted to people around 9 years old, or to young teens (12-15). In Europe, they treat these people with psychological counseling and give them libido suppressing drugs: instead of hating and attacking them, they consider them unfortunate and provide them with treatment, attempting to help them to integrate with society.
And I to consider them to have an unfortunate condition and pity them. If expressing this condition did not constitute victimizing kids in most situations, I would have no problem with it. For example, I don't care if pedophiles have sex with non-sentient robots that look like children to satisfy their urges. Seeing as how homosexual relationship between adults victimizes nobody, therefore this comparison is not the same.
Eich appears to have decided we should not legally recognize homosexual marriage, but not decided to attack homosexual people.
He is not physically attacking them. He is advocating that they not be given equal rights as other people. He is attacking them on a social level.
That's not bigotry; that's tolerance. He believes that particular aspect of a person's behavior is incorrect or harmful to society, but tolerates these people.
It's not tolerance to advocate for segregation but not slavery. That's just less severe bigotry. And Eich is a less severe bigot than someone who advocates slavery. He is pretty much equally bigoted as someone who advocates segregation or banning biracial marriage. You don't magically become "not a bigot" by simply being less bigoted than someone else.
On the other hand, we are not tolerant: we don't see this as a problem. If we "tolerated" this stuff, it would be because we find it something distasteful that we need to actively allow for.
If you are saying I am more than tolerant (or "at least tolerant") of gay people I would agree. I don't dislike (and therefore am not forced to "tolerate") that other people engage in it. I am however tolerant of bigots like Eich. I tolerate his bigotry, in the sense that I am not advocated that he be imprisoned or have his freedom of speech removed. I feel people should have the right to be bigots. What NOBODY has the right to is to force other people into mutual relationships (like employment, friendship, marriage, customer/vendor, etc). I am free to try to convince an employer to fire an employee, or convince an employee to quit their job, or to convince a consumer to boycott a vendor, or convince a husband to leave a wife. Ultimately each person is responsible for their own decisions to start, continue, or end mutual relationships, based on whatever advice they find convincing.
The only entity that is not allowed the right to free association is the government. The government must treat everyone equally. This is the contract we as US citizens have with the government.
There's a real lack of information there though. There is real lack of knowledge of how things will change, with a real high-probability that some social changes of a known model will occur. There is also an accepted ideal that such changes are harmful--it may be incorrect, but it's accepted. That makes these considerations valid. It is, effectively, an expression of a low risk appetite.
Accepted by whom? "It's accepted" (i.e. by someone) really doesn't mean anything. This is what I am talking about when I say the bans on same sex marriage have very vague justifications. Nobody can define exactly what it is that their worried will happen. It's always some kind of "tearing of the social fabric", or "loss of family values". If we allow gay marriage and anything bad happens, the predictions are so vague that they can be attributed after the fact like the predictions of Nostradamus.
I am citing sociology, morality (morals aren't based on what's actually right and wrong, but rather cultural perception of such), risk management, and chaos theory in these analyses. Chaos theory particularly states that everything is deterministic, but that sufficient flux exists due to minor details, and that we have imperfect knowledge which correlates to what is perceived as "randomness". People naturally act with consideration to this via a fear of the unknown and a tendency to notice when something may make far-reaching, unpredictable changes.
And yet you are not advocating banning butterflies from flapping their wings...
I don't believe the correct way to handle his opposing view is to beat him with a cudgel until he reluctantly accepts that society is following a wrong-headed path and pretends to play along.
Nobody is handling it this way or advocating handling it this way in a literal sense. In a metaphorical sense, "bet him with a cudgel" can mean anything including criticism and social pressure.
Either allow him to keep his views but push through the opposition of him and others like him, or retain a strong society throughout the change and help him to understand and accept it. Punishment is for people who commit crimes, not people who are harmlessly ignorant.
He hasn't committed any crimes and he is not being punished. Only the government has the power to truly punish people. My wife can "punish" me, but only because I choose to stay married to her. She doesn't have any power to punish me if I decide I don't need her approval.
Brendan Eich was never entitled to his job as CEO of Mozilla. It was always contingent upon 2 things: the continued willingness of Eich to want to be CEO and the continued willingness of the board to want him as CEO. As soon as either of these conditions is false, neither side has the power to compel the other.
And that is a valid position; however, you are holding the position that Eich deserves this punishment for his views, not that he is being treated unfairly and that the best option for everyone is for him to accept this unfair situation and step down. While this makes business sense, it doesn't make ethical sense: we are claiming Eich deserves this treatment because his views differ from ours in some way.
I don't know why I have to keep repeating myself, but no I don't think Bredan Eich deserves to be punished for his views. I believe he is responsible for his views which is different than punishment. As I have said at least 10 times already, I think his personal views prevent him from being effective at his job, and I think the decision to fire him (had he not resigned) would be perfectly appropriate.
While this makes business sense, it doesn't make ethical sense: we are claiming Eich deserves this treatment because his views differ from ours in some way.
It is not unethical to fire people. He is not "getting the treatment he deserves". As a sof
We do have people who are gay and there is absolutely no way to de-gay them; but then we also have people who are curious, bisexual, or who were gay in high school and then halfway through college became bi or just abandoned gay stuff altogether, or who identify as "straight" but still engage in gay sexual behaviors as a diversion (i.e. to get off, or for whatever reason), and so on.
So what? It's quite obvious that human sexuality is not binary. It's a spectrum or several spectra. The fact that some people are bisexual or curious does not mean they are deciding what their sexual preferences are.
Because of this, some people develop the valid opinion that we don't want to create this social shift in society.
Exactly what makes this opinion valid other than the fact that you are free to have whatever opinion you want? To me this is like saying "Some people have the valid opinion that black people should be slaves". Yes it's valid in the sense that it is protected by the first amendment (along with every opinion) and that's pretty much it.
This is not necessarily wrong-headed thinking: they have a concern, it may not be valid, but it is as they understand the world and so they want to protect it from this estimated damage. There's even enough logical argument to say they have a fair, reasonable probability of being right;
If this isn't wrong-headed thinking, then I don't know what is. This is subjective. They prefer a puritanical world and see sexual liberation as "damage". They see anything that deviates from their christian world view as damage. I see lack of freedom as damage. Luckily for me this is the United States and not Saudi Arabia and our constitution values freedom over tradition and family values. If people want to restrict freedom in order to preserve their traditions, they should first focus on dismantling the constitution, or consider trying to convert Saudi Arabia to Christianity and moving there.
Is it bad that children will have greater exposure to sexual behavior in society?
I don't agree that homosexuality causes children to be exposed to sexual behavior any more than heterosexuality does. Furthermore I think the puritanical approach of preventing sexuality through shame is more destructive than the sexuality it is trying to prevent.
Is this really a difficult concept?
No it's not difficult. I think it's based on false premises, faulty logic, and it assumes a different set of morals than what I espouse and what the constitution provides.
It didn't start with "Some Mozilla Inc employees have voiced these concerns, and we support them..."
Actually that's exactly how it started. The OK cupid stunt came afterwards.
It grew into a bunch of whining on forums. Mozilla employees have posted on here stating that they find this whole situation disgusting and that they have nothing against Brendan.
It's easy to call what other people do, whining. I could call what you are doing whining. But this kind of characterization is pretty childish. And I don't doubt that some mozilla employees support Eich, but it is clear that many don't. I would say keeping a CEO that polarizes other employees and customers is a bad idea from a business perspective.
Do you remember the 60s? When having the political view of a "Communist" would get you arrested, or banned from employment, or what have you? Do you realize that many of our "enlightened" policies are tied to that--much of our current liberal-democrat politics is stuff that would get you strung up several decades ago. Obama should be executed for treason for supporting the ACA. Is that the world you want to live in? Is that America?
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Obama or the ACA. I noticed you lumped "getting arrested" with "b
You purported that something has no negative effects;
None that are significant.
I purported that this is not necessarily true, from some standpoint.
It can probably be shown that it is not necessarily true that there are no negative effects of heterosexual marriage either. Surely an institution as widespread as marriage can't possibly have zero negative effects. My point would be that these negative effects are not significant relative to other negative effects if marriage were outlawed for heterosexual people.
You have no sense of subtlety.
It's not that I don't see the subtlety in your arguments. I just think your arguments aren't very good, and I choose not to reply to the parts that I find irrelevant.
If I say there are no negative effects of shoes, therefore it should be legal for people to buy and sell shoes. You come along and find some relatively insignificant way in which shoes are hurting society (e.g. more people are getting sprained ankles when they run without shoes), and I must now correct myself that there are no negative effects significant enough to warrant making shoes illegal. And then you get all offended that I didn't appreciate your argument. Sorry, I just think it's a stupid argument.
Eich's behavior leads me to believe that he feels gay marriage is somehow wrong--that it's not a thing our society should support--but that he harbors no aggression or ill will toward any individual.
Replace "gay" with "black". Has anything really changed?
He has not apologized for supporting Proposition 8 because, I would guess, he believes it was the right thing to do; but he also has supported individuals who are gay, has provided for them to not be treated differently than any other individuals, to be denied anything for being gay, because he appears to believe that this is also the right thing to do. You can't marry another person of the same sex; but you also can't be denied a job or pushed out of a social group or beaten to death for wanting to do exactly that.
I'm sure many people supported segregation in the south despite being opposed to the slavery from a century earlier.
The short version is, again, that I don't like the idea of not being able to participate in the political system because people don't agree with you.
And nothing like that is happening in the USA.
If we voted in an overwhelming proposition with 92% support for putting all jews in concentration camps and working them to death, that wouldn't happen because the courts would claim the entire country is nuts and we're not allowed to do that.
Would voting for something like this be considered "participating in the political system"? Don't you think people that vote for things like this should be held responsible for their views? I sure as hell don't want to hire someone if I found out they voted for the holocaust.
And here we've had Eich forced out of society, in some small part. He's not allowed to be CEO of Mozilla Inc, by rule of what a bunch of assholes on the Internet have to say about it.
Getting fired from a job is being forced out of society? As the board of Mozilla you are morally required to hire Brendan Eich (and not fire him) as your CEO? It is not just people on the internet. It was other Mozilla employees that started calling for his resignation.
I am all for freedom of speech. I am all for equal protection under the law. Since when is "being denied a job" a violation of your rights?
I understand what you are saying. I just thought it was completely irrelevant and uninteresting.
Through defensive design. By requiring that system design promotes safety; therefore, there are unlikely to be serious safety issues. The key is to design systems that are anti-fragile, AND that are robust such that random safety issues aren't emerging after product release.
This is an example of things never becoming issues in the first place. And you cannot rely on the fact that you will simply have a 100% perfect design from the start and not worry about any issues that pop up after release. So I will reiterate, that it is reasonable to fix the issues that pop up after release as you discover them.
This is not a valid excuse for designing and releasing or using systems with inherent vulnerabilities that are therefore likely to have safety impacting issues later, and therefore: incurring this extra liability.
Obviously I was not advocating designing systems with inherent vulnerabilities.
Most people drive their car less than 2 hours a day, BUT rely on their smoke detector to help protect their lives 10+ hours a day.
And even given this fact, there are 14x as many people dying in car accidents as in house fires.
This assumes you are an average driver. But perhaps I am a far-safer-than-average driver driving a far-safer-than-average car.
It also assumes you are an average home owner. Perhaps I am extra safe when it comes to making sure my electrical work is up to code and I never leave the stove unattended.
You claim to have calculated risks which are actually impossible for you to have calculated, which is the reason, that I know your claim about the relative likelihood is definitely false (That which cannot be true due to an absolute condition, is guaranteed to be false.).
So what you are saying is that unless I have calculated the risk with absolute accuracy, I can not do a proper risk/benefit analysis, I am supposed to just assume it is as deadly as anything can be?
The Idea "I want my house to be nice and toasty when I come home; even if there is this substantial chance that some Chinese hacker can kill me"; is a bit of a depraved notion.
And yet this has literally never happened. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I don't think it's reasonable to be so worried about something that is so rare, that not only do I know of any cases, I can't even find any cases of it happening on the internet.
The fact is it's not possible to calculate the "risk" part of risk/reward. The fact is any danger of incalculable risk is not worth it, if the danger is great enough. The reward has to be such that: the absence of the reward is as bad or nearly as bad as the maximum potential negative impact of potential hazards that may exist.
Bullshit. You can't calculate risks with absolute accuracy either. You're just estimating like I am. Pretending you know which risks are incalculable and which risks are calculable, and exactly what they are, doesn't make you any more safe. At least I am honest that I don't know, and I am just making an estimate about the level of risk for everything in my life.
So the software you write is vulnerable to script kiddies?
No... it's not a reasonable course of action. When safety issues are "discovered" the hard way, lives are lost.
I'm not sure how you think safety problems could be fixed *before* they are discovered. Not only is fixing safety problems *after* they are discovered reasonable, it's really the only possibility. How soon you fix these issues after they are discovered is what makes the difference.
It is a true, but a useless fact that nothing is 100% safe.
It is useful to people who refrain from doing certain things they might benefit from because they are *not* 100% safe. Sometimes people need to be reminded that nothing is 100% safe, and that everything entails a risk.
Do you really think you can compare the "safety" of Driving to Work, against the "safety" of connecting a thermostat or smoke detector to the internet?
I already did. And in fact lots of people die everyday driving to work. I am not aware of a single case of someone dying due to their thermostat or smoke detector being hooked up to the internet. One might say the reason these 2 things are not comparable is that driving to work is much more dangerous. I however recognize that there is risk with both.
Traditional smoke detectors are highly reliable life protecting devices. Making them microprocessor-controlled and wiring up to the internet transforms the detector from a robust device you should be able to bet your life on, even during the apocalypse -- come hell or high water, into this fragile piece where one misplaced line of code, or one n'er'do'well who hacked in --- can put your life at risk: due to reliance on a safety device that doesn't work.
Well I hope you don't drive a car made in the last 10 years. Those are controlled by microprocessors too.
It's an unequal tradeoff in the first place: so you drive to work. The "next best thing" to driving to work, is likely to have tremendously greater cost, or force you to move house.
You are about 14 times as likely to die in a car accident as a house fire. Every day you drive a car is as dangerous as going 14 days without any smoke detector at all. You've made a calculated risk to drive your car. I have made a calculated risk to connect my thermostat and smoke detector the internet. Maybe I will die in a fire and you can say "I told you so". Maybe you will die in a car accident and I can say "I told you so". It's all about balancing risk vs. reward. I want my house nice and toasty when I come home.
Are they factoring in carbon offsets and the costs of mitigating the pollution they cause?
Driving drunk is still more convenient than calling a cab or bugging a friend. Driving drunk will never be 100% secure.
I guess it could be depending on how drunk you are. If you are so drunk that the likelihood of killing other people or yourself is significant than those sorts of consequences make things decidedly less convenient (given that death is pretty inconvenient).
Non-Falsifiable statements convey no useful information. I can respond to any mishap or failure with the same verbiage and have no more or less a valid point.
When I say "A is possible" it does not imply "A always happens"
What I am advocating is to use judgement rather than an absolute rule to accept no risk, or extreme risk, which you did not seem to understand.
Falsifiable claims (i.e. scientific/empirical claims) are not the only statements that convey useful information. Logical arguments (which is what I was making), do not need to be falsifiable.
I could say "If all unicorns are purple, then if you find a unicorn, it will be purple". That's not really a falsifiable claim. There is no experiment you could (or should do) to verify this. It's a logical claim.
Maybe you just learned the term "falsifiable", if so I will offer you some advice that you are using it wrong.
Whether it is "driving drunk" or "driving sober to work" neither activity is 100% secure.
So now all the people who think driving drunk is safe can stop worrying about things that are not as dangerous as drunk driving.
The hell it is. If a fire starts when your away chances are your still looking at significant/total loss from fire and or water damage from efforts to stop the fire.. by time monitoring company farts around with your contact list, finally calls the fire department and fire department arrives.
I didn't say that the benefit was immense. I said it outweighed the risk of hacking.