Article 31 of the East German constitution nominally protected privacy, and its laws nominally protected people against warrantless searches by police. As far as I know, the East German police ("Volkspolizei") abided by those laws; they didn't have any reason not to.
The Stasi was a separate national security agency, concerned with countering terrorism, espionage, and sabotage. They didn't have "defendants" and didn't need to show evidence because that's not usually what they were concerned with. They'd just impose travel and job restrictions, and if they deemed you particularly dangerous, would send you to reeducation camps or mental institutions, all in the name of protecting the public.
So, there is no obvious fundamental legal or constitutional difference between how national security worked in East Germany and how it works in the US; the difference is simply that in the past, we have not given a lot of power to our national security related organizations; it's a difference in degree, not principle.
The US is using its national intelligence agencies to obtain intelligence on terrorists trying to kill people. The intelligence agencies themselves don't have police powers. The suspect in this case is accused of assisting a terrorist group. East Germany's secret police had both an intelligence function and police powers.
East Germany's police wasn't called "the secret police", it was called "state security service", meaning an organization whose job is to protect the nation and its government. That doesn't just include preventing killings, but also means identifying people whose political views or mental state were deemed incompatible with the interests of the socialist state. And generally, they didn't operate through "police powers" either (i.e., they wouldn't go through the judicial process, and it wasn't about crime or punishment). Instead, if they deemed you a danger, you'd be denied jobs, be prevented from traveling, be sent to reeducation camps, or thrown into mental institutions. Clearly, we aren't there yet in the US. But there are disturbing analogies.
Basically Uncle Tom Obama the choom gang coward looks far far worse because he promised time and time again to be far far better than his predecessors and instead, well, history has proven that while he is a skilled teleprompter reader his actions prove him to be a far right sycophant.
Yes, Obama's failure is particularly profound because he did the opposite of what he promised. But your diagnosis is wrong.
I used to be a registered Democrat and I voted for Obama. But it is clear to me now that there is little difference between Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and conservatives: they all are beholden to their own special interests, and they are all using laws and regulations to enrich their buddies, whether they be unions or corporations. And the NSA, police, military, and government employees are every politician's buddy and get what they want. So stop paying lip service to the propaganda that "the left" somehow has your interests at heart.
What we need is more politicians that fight for individual liberties and reduce the size of the US federal government.
Until 2001, things weren't so bad. After 9/11, Bush and Congress went crazy. Obama was elected in 2008 to reverse this trend. He had made great promises to restore the rule of law, privacy, due process, and constitutionality (and also to reduce crony capitalism and craft a sane drug policy). As a constitutional scholar and liberal, he had all the credentials. That's why people voted for him; that's why I voted for him. Instead of doing what he promised, Obama has actually made things far worse, and because he's a Democrat, not even the Democrats have opposed his policies.
Yes, Obama is particularly responsible for the sorry state that we are in now: he failed to do what he was elected to do, namely undo the massive damage done by Bush. Instead, Obama has actually made things even worse.
Philosophical discussion is regarded as unforgivably weird and threatening here
Not at all. What is still (fortunately) weird and unforgivable is the kind of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical drivel coming out of the Frankfurt school and the French cultural elite. The US, by and large, is still governed more by reason and pragmatism.
No, filling up itself doesn't take "10 minutes", it takes a couple of minutes, the rest is other things people do. If you increase fill-up time, you increase overall waiting times substantially. At 2 minutes, most people stick with their car, in particular when it's busy. At 20 minutes, you are guaranteed that everybody leaves their car and goes off doing something else.
IF you have your car in a garage and charge it overnight, then you may rarely ever need to charge it away from home -- only for road trips, really. Depending on your driving habits, you may go months without visiting a charging station.
I use public transportation or my bike for commuting (depending on the weather). I use my car for all the other trips. But everybody has "other trips", so the fact that electric cars work reasonably well for daily commutes doesn't change the fact that they are not a good solution for other trips.
Today's electric car technology can't meet everyone's needs, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine it meeting the needs of 1% of the population
Yes, in the sense that a Porsche may also meet the needs of 1% of the population: if you don't have to worry about money, get an electric car. And don't pretend that you're doing something for the environment in doing so, because you aren't.
Yes, they are still sub-optimal for long road trips. However, as long as you can get a full day of normal driving in on a single charge, and recharge overnight in your own garage the picture looks much better, especially as a primary car where the second car where the other is gasoline powered
So now I need two garage spaces. I also pay for insurance, registration, and regular maintenance for two cars. And that's supposed to be either cost effective or environmentally friendly?
As someone said "There's nothing wrong with electric cars that batteries with twice the capacity at half the cost wouldn't fix", and there's plenty of promising new battery technologies on the horizon, we just need one of them to make it out of the lab.
Well, and once they are out of the lab, electric cars may be cost effective. Right now, they are not.
Last time I took I-80 westbound we had to wait for 15 minutes to get to a pump, then 5 minutes to pump with another 10 minutes to wait for traffic to get out of my way so we can get back on the highway.
Yes, and with electric, you will wait 60 minutes to get to a pump (or longer) because everybody's fill-up takes longer now.
Electric cars still look quite unattractive to me. The primary problem is the weight, cost, and limited life of the batteries. But long charging times are also still a problem, and even 20 minutes is rather long.
Look, Americans and Europeans are going to continue spying on each other; it's the rational and right thing to do. All the hoopla about it is just political theater. Americans and Europeans should focus on fixing domestic spying, because that really is a problem.
The problem here is the scale at which it can be practiced nowadays by the most powerful entities. You should always be wary of that kind of concentration of power. The strong often abuse their power.
You should. That's why Americans should complain about being spied on by American spy agencies, and French should complain about being spied on by French spy agencies, and Germans should complain about being spied on by German spy agencies: it's your own government that has power over you, not foreign governments.
All the power granted by this collection of information is thus turned towards the only outlet: population control and the erosion of freedom.
Unfortunately, that's not being addressed. Europeans don't seem to care that their own national governments spy on every aspect of their lives.
In a globalized world where most countries sort of "work together" and their borders become blurry (from an industrial point of view) it does more harm than good.
Seems to me that in those circumstances, spying is even more important. After all, just because Germany or France say they support us in something doesn't mean they actually do. They have their own agendas and interests. As the French president used to say: countries don't have friends, they only have interests. The reason the Europeans are making such a fuss about this is because their formerly great and powerful spy agencies can't keep up anymore.
that harms global economy which eventually boils down to every single one of us.
Trade restrictions, subsidies, regulations, bailouts, and other misguided government policies do a lot more harm than a little spying. And if spying prevents the US from being conned by its allies, then it's actually good for the global economy.
LinkedIn's service seems to be based on Rapportive, which has been around for a while. On desktops, they can just hook into web mail services and mail readers through extensions; no rerouting required. Of course, the information still ends up on their servers, but that's kind of the point: how could they give you information related to your mail messages if they couldn't look at it?
On mobile, the hooks for this are missing. Furthermore, iOS is rather insistent on the precious specialness of Apple's own applications, so replacing the mail app is hard too. If they want to provide this service, inserting themselves in the middle is basically all they can do.
I was using Rapportive briefly on the desktop but didn't find it all that useful. I can imagine that for some people it is useful (e.g., if you're in HR and get a lot of emails from people you don't know), however. Since it's voluntary, I don't think it's a big deal.
As for corporate email providers, they have a simple way of stopping this.
Your misrepresentations and the moderation of my factual response shows again that union supporters are a bunch of thugs. Thanks for confirming that part too.
Ah, yes. I compared to all the other crap in the article, that just paled. Point is: you're pre-wired not to be too happy for a reason.
The real problem isn't that people are irrationally unhappy or stressed out, the point is that they are stressed out over the wrong things. There are plenty of things to be scared of and that people could do something about: lack of exercise, bad nutrition, lack of savings and retirement, lack of networking, financial fraud, untrustworthy partners, etc. Yet, what people actually stress out about doesn't actually make a difference in their lives: banking, global warming, health care, "the 1%", etc. It's a cognitive problem, not a problem of insufficient happiness.
If she doesn't know how to encrypt her data, she isn't a professional journalist but an incompetent wannabe. Let's hope her sources sue her and she will never work again.
The EU is not analogous, because half of it was under a completely distinct economic system as little as 20 years ago.
Half of it? Are you crazy? There are a bunch of smallish population new states, and they are not the ones that are failing.
You said that the US is "less educated, more violent, and more plutocratic than comparable nations". What nations are "comparable"? Where is the data supporting your statement? You compare the entire US to Luxembourg?
Stop making such stupid statements and learn something about the rest of the world.
You need to convince me, the UK, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, or other first world(look up the term) countries are doing empirically worse on one of those three concepts with concrete metrics compared to the US.
Which part of this don't you understand?
One thing people keep getting wrong is that they compare the US as a whole to the best individual European countries, but you need to compare either US states to European nations, or the US as a whole to Europe as a whole.
(And by "Europe", obviously I mean the EU, because that's the entity that's analogous to the US.)
The UK, which has official classes has greater social mobility than the US, for example.
Which part of this did you not understand?
Social mobility, poverty, and educational achievement often compare different populations or use relative outcomes.
I don't need to "convince" you of anything. You need to do some reading. Perhaps some traveling too.
I have family in Europe. I've spent several years in Europe. And if you want to check the facts, Wikipedia is a few clicks away. Or just open a f*cking newspaper for once and look at what's going on in Spain, Greece, France, etc. But, hey, don't let facts and experience get in the way of your ideology.
One thing people keep getting wrong is that they compare the US as a whole to the best individual European countries, but you need to compare either US states to European nations, or the US as a whole to Europe as a whole.
Furthermore, many of the statistics are just wrong or misleading. Crime rates in Europe aren't low. Social mobility, poverty, and educational achievement often compare different populations or use relative outcomes. Many unpleasant statistics in Europe (e.g., racism, hate crimes, poverty) are manipulated or simply not even collected.
It posits that "the brain is relatively poor at turning positive experiences into emotional learning neural structure." I don't see how these are related.
It is "poor" at this because that's what motivates you to actually do things day to day.
2. The article doesn't really talk about behavior at all. It talks about learning and how survival learning has priority.
Yes, and that's its problem. Your brain evolved certain levels of happiness and satisfaction for the purpose of modifying your behavior.
3. It also talks alot about internal satisfaction, or more specifically "repeatedly internalize the sense of having our three core needs met: safety, satisfaction, and connection."
Who cares? You didn't evolve to be satisfied and connected, you evolved to survive and f*ck.
Think of all the people who tell you why the world is a good place, but they’re still jerks.
Not sure why anyone would take advice from someone with that attitude...
I don't know either, and I didn't write that. Maybe you should pay more attention to your quoting.
Slashdot Mirror
Article 31 of the East German constitution nominally protected privacy, and its laws nominally protected people against warrantless searches by police. As far as I know, the East German police ("Volkspolizei") abided by those laws; they didn't have any reason not to.
The Stasi was a separate national security agency, concerned with countering terrorism, espionage, and sabotage. They didn't have "defendants" and didn't need to show evidence because that's not usually what they were concerned with. They'd just impose travel and job restrictions, and if they deemed you particularly dangerous, would send you to reeducation camps or mental institutions, all in the name of protecting the public.
So, there is no obvious fundamental legal or constitutional difference between how national security worked in East Germany and how it works in the US; the difference is simply that in the past, we have not given a lot of power to our national security related organizations; it's a difference in degree, not principle.
East Germany's police wasn't called "the secret police", it was called "state security service", meaning an organization whose job is to protect the nation and its government. That doesn't just include preventing killings, but also means identifying people whose political views or mental state were deemed incompatible with the interests of the socialist state. And generally, they didn't operate through "police powers" either (i.e., they wouldn't go through the judicial process, and it wasn't about crime or punishment). Instead, if they deemed you a danger, you'd be denied jobs, be prevented from traveling, be sent to reeducation camps, or thrown into mental institutions. Clearly, we aren't there yet in the US. But there are disturbing analogies.
If only presidents didn't appoint political cronies and sycophants to the people enforcing those principles.
If only individual states could retain more freedom to protect the people living there from governmental overreach.
Yes, Obama's failure is particularly profound because he did the opposite of what he promised. But your diagnosis is wrong.
I used to be a registered Democrat and I voted for Obama. But it is clear to me now that there is little difference between Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and conservatives: they all are beholden to their own special interests, and they are all using laws and regulations to enrich their buddies, whether they be unions or corporations. And the NSA, police, military, and government employees are every politician's buddy and get what they want. So stop paying lip service to the propaganda that "the left" somehow has your interests at heart.
What we need is more politicians that fight for individual liberties and reduce the size of the US federal government.
Until 2001, things weren't so bad. After 9/11, Bush and Congress went crazy. Obama was elected in 2008 to reverse this trend. He had made great promises to restore the rule of law, privacy, due process, and constitutionality (and also to reduce crony capitalism and craft a sane drug policy). As a constitutional scholar and liberal, he had all the credentials. That's why people voted for him; that's why I voted for him. Instead of doing what he promised, Obama has actually made things far worse, and because he's a Democrat, not even the Democrats have opposed his policies.
Yes, Obama is particularly responsible for the sorry state that we are in now: he failed to do what he was elected to do, namely undo the massive damage done by Bush. Instead, Obama has actually made things even worse.
Not at all. What is still (fortunately) weird and unforgivable is the kind of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical drivel coming out of the Frankfurt school and the French cultural elite. The US, by and large, is still governed more by reason and pragmatism.
No, filling up itself doesn't take "10 minutes", it takes a couple of minutes, the rest is other things people do. If you increase fill-up time, you increase overall waiting times substantially. At 2 minutes, most people stick with their car, in particular when it's busy. At 20 minutes, you are guaranteed that everybody leaves their car and goes off doing something else.
I use public transportation or my bike for commuting (depending on the weather). I use my car for all the other trips. But everybody has "other trips", so the fact that electric cars work reasonably well for daily commutes doesn't change the fact that they are not a good solution for other trips.
Yes, in the sense that a Porsche may also meet the needs of 1% of the population: if you don't have to worry about money, get an electric car. And don't pretend that you're doing something for the environment in doing so, because you aren't.
So now I need two garage spaces. I also pay for insurance, registration, and regular maintenance for two cars. And that's supposed to be either cost effective or environmentally friendly?
Well, and once they are out of the lab, electric cars may be cost effective. Right now, they are not.
Yes, and with electric, you will wait 60 minutes to get to a pump (or longer) because everybody's fill-up takes longer now.
Electric cars still look quite unattractive to me. The primary problem is the weight, cost, and limited life of the batteries. But long charging times are also still a problem, and even 20 minutes is rather long.
Look, Americans and Europeans are going to continue spying on each other; it's the rational and right thing to do. All the hoopla about it is just political theater. Americans and Europeans should focus on fixing domestic spying, because that really is a problem.
You should. That's why Americans should complain about being spied on by American spy agencies, and French should complain about being spied on by French spy agencies, and Germans should complain about being spied on by German spy agencies: it's your own government that has power over you, not foreign governments.
Unfortunately, that's not being addressed. Europeans don't seem to care that their own national governments spy on every aspect of their lives.
Seems to me that in those circumstances, spying is even more important. After all, just because Germany or France say they support us in something doesn't mean they actually do. They have their own agendas and interests. As the French president used to say: countries don't have friends, they only have interests. The reason the Europeans are making such a fuss about this is because their formerly great and powerful spy agencies can't keep up anymore.
Trade restrictions, subsidies, regulations, bailouts, and other misguided government policies do a lot more harm than a little spying. And if spying prevents the US from being conned by its allies, then it's actually good for the global economy.
LinkedIn's service seems to be based on Rapportive, which has been around for a while. On desktops, they can just hook into web mail services and mail readers through extensions; no rerouting required. Of course, the information still ends up on their servers, but that's kind of the point: how could they give you information related to your mail messages if they couldn't look at it?
On mobile, the hooks for this are missing. Furthermore, iOS is rather insistent on the precious specialness of Apple's own applications, so replacing the mail app is hard too. If they want to provide this service, inserting themselves in the middle is basically all they can do.
I was using Rapportive briefly on the desktop but didn't find it all that useful. I can imagine that for some people it is useful (e.g., if you're in HR and get a lot of emails from people you don't know), however. Since it's voluntary, I don't think it's a big deal.
As for corporate email providers, they have a simple way of stopping this.
Your misrepresentations and the moderation of my factual response shows again that union supporters are a bunch of thugs. Thanks for confirming that part too.
Ah, yes. I compared to all the other crap in the article, that just paled. Point is: you're pre-wired not to be too happy for a reason.
The real problem isn't that people are irrationally unhappy or stressed out, the point is that they are stressed out over the wrong things. There are plenty of things to be scared of and that people could do something about: lack of exercise, bad nutrition, lack of savings and retirement, lack of networking, financial fraud, untrustworthy partners, etc. Yet, what people actually stress out about doesn't actually make a difference in their lives: banking, global warming, health care, "the 1%", etc. It's a cognitive problem, not a problem of insufficient happiness.
What's strange about it? Journalists' livelihood depend on access, and they don't get access if they don't do what they are told.
If she doesn't know how to encrypt her data, she isn't a professional journalist but an incompetent wannabe. Let's hope her sources sue her and she will never work again.
By the way, the entire EU is under a "different economic system" from the US; after all, their poor economic performance must come from somewhere.
Half of it? Are you crazy? There are a bunch of smallish population new states, and they are not the ones that are failing.
You said that the US is "less educated, more violent, and more plutocratic than comparable nations". What nations are "comparable"? Where is the data supporting your statement? You compare the entire US to Luxembourg?
Stop making such stupid statements and learn something about the rest of the world.
Which part of this don't you understand?
(And by "Europe", obviously I mean the EU, because that's the entity that's analogous to the US.)
Which part of this did you not understand?
I don't need to "convince" you of anything. You need to do some reading. Perhaps some traveling too.
I have family in Europe. I've spent several years in Europe. And if you want to check the facts, Wikipedia is a few clicks away. Or just open a f*cking newspaper for once and look at what's going on in Spain, Greece, France, etc. But, hey, don't let facts and experience get in the way of your ideology.
One thing people keep getting wrong is that they compare the US as a whole to the best individual European countries, but you need to compare either US states to European nations, or the US as a whole to Europe as a whole.
Furthermore, many of the statistics are just wrong or misleading. Crime rates in Europe aren't low. Social mobility, poverty, and educational achievement often compare different populations or use relative outcomes. Many unpleasant statistics in Europe (e.g., racism, hate crimes, poverty) are manipulated or simply not even collected.
It is "poor" at this because that's what motivates you to actually do things day to day.
Yes, and that's its problem. Your brain evolved certain levels of happiness and satisfaction for the purpose of modifying your behavior.
Who cares? You didn't evolve to be satisfied and connected, you evolved to survive and f*ck.
I don't know either, and I didn't write that. Maybe you should pay more attention to your quoting.