But media heads would assplode, and both Trump and Putin love that shit.
We'll see what happens, but I give the odds of Putin handing Snowden over before Trump's first term is up to be 60/40.
I also think Trump would commute Snowden's sentence after a conviction, because it would be a popular move and Trump likes to do popular things that make the media irrationally angry.
Yes, now the contractors double up on a buddy system so they can watch each other to prevent future leaks about their continuing unconstitutional spying.
The same prosecutor who agreed to let him leave and then charged him as a fugitive.
Clarification: to my knowledge the prosecutor did not "agree to let him leave." The prosecutor at the time did not have legal cause to make him stay. "I can't stop you from leaving the country right now" is not the same thing as "I've determined you've not committed a crime and will not be charging you." Basically the same as yelling "AM I BEING DETAINED?!?" and the cop reluctantly agreeing he has no grounds to hold you right now even though he's sure you're the murderer and will be going to the DA and the judge for a warrant later. Also he was not "charged as a fugitive." He's wanted for an interview because the Swedish legal system is half inquisitorial, half adversarial (unlike the full adversarial US system). At first the investigators are seeking "truth," so they have to talk to the suspect before they are charged with a crime, unlike in the US where the cops and the DA are always trying to bust your ass.
So, they can't "charge" him until they talk to him, and once they charge him that sets in motion their "right to a speedy trial" laws which means there's no sense charging him unless they can get their hands on him back in Sweden. It's all a mess.
I don't see Russia reversing their position anytime soon so his involuntary return isn't looking all that likely..
Putin only kept Snowden to embarrass Obama. Now that Trump and Putin are buddies, I could well see him saying "as a sign of improving relations between our two great nations we return this criminal to you such that you may serve justice." And Trump has only ever referred to Snowden as a traitor.
I wouldn't be shocked if Trump pardoned Snowden, it would make Russia look good by justifying their harbouring of Snowden and it's just the sort of PR splash/distraction that Trump loves.
Trump has only ever referred to Snowden as a traitor. I think it's more likely Trump's pal Putin will say "As a sign of the improving relations between our two great nations, we return to you this criminal such that you may serve justice."
That said, Trump is also a populist and wants people to like him*. If enough people show enough support for Snowden, Trump may do exactly what Obama has done with Manning: a trial and a commuted sentence. My personal view of Snowden is mixed. I loved him when he blew the whistle on what are in my opinion unconstitutional programs that spy on the American people. But then he also revealed perfectly legal and constitutional programs in which the government was spying on foreigners and foreign governments. So I wouldn't mind a trail/conviction/commutation approach. I think that would satisfy the greatest number of people.
Not sure about Assange though, Trump's lovefest with Wikileaks will come to a very quick end if they ever dump something that he wants hidden. In fact, aiding the election of someone who's campaigned on the vilification of the press may be one of the more short-sighted things that Assange has done.
I think Assange was more interested in keeping Hillary, who wanted Assange drone striked, out of power than in helping Trump. Everyone seems to have done a 180 on Assange. Liberals loved him and conservatives hated him when he was leaking Iraq war military secrets but as soon as he started revealing the DNC's dirty laundry he became a scoundrel to the left and a hero to the right. My opinion of Assange never changed: Assange wants to save the world from powerful secret-keepers because Assange wants people to love him for saving the world. I have no doubt that if he gets dirt on any shady dealings of the Trump administration he'll leak those, too. Both left and right keep thinking Assange is on their side or against it, when no, Assange is on the side of Assange.
Also, Trump's not vilifying the press because it's "the press." He's vilifying the type of press that lies about stuff like CNN saying it's illegal to look at WikiLeaks. If the press would stop lying and taking sides while pretending to be honest and unbiased, well, then they'd be like WikiLeaks, honest brokers of information, and would be much more difficult to vilify.
* Yes, I know saying "Trump wants people to like him" doesn't make sense to liberals who hate him. But the whole story of the election is how out of touch the media and coastal elites are with the opinions of the common man. They kept thinking "kicking out illegal Mexican rapists" and "banning muslim immigration" would totally sink him because none of their friends think that way, but depending on how you ask the question you can get polling results of 60%+ who are pro-wall or pro-muslim ban. They're not unpopular opinions, just unpopular on TV.
Putin only kept Snowden to embarrass Obama. Now that Putin's pal Trump is about to take office, he may well say "As a sign of improving relations between our two great nations we return to you this criminal such that you may see justice done." The only things I've ever heard Trump say about Snowden are that he thinks he's a traitor. Snowden needs that Obama pardon PDQ.
So for example if he pardoned Snowden for crimes of espionage and leaking state secrets then isn't there a risk he could be charged still, for say, treason?
He wouldn't be pardoned for the crime he would be pardoned for the act. Rather, he would receive a blanket pardon for any criminal acts committed against the United States between such-and-such date and such-and-such date. So no, he wouldn't be tried for a different crime stemming from the same act. At least not by the federal government. If he committed a state crime the state could still try him, but in Snowden's case it's unlikely any of his actions violated state law, and even so it would be an incredible dick move and very disrespectful to the office of the Presidency (regardless of what anyone thinks of Obama). It would set a terrible precedent and would probably look like malicious prosecution.
I can see why, if this is the case, that Obama might want legal certainty on what he's actually pardoning before doing so even if other presidents may be a bit more laissez-faire about it.
I can see that. We also still don't know the extent of everything that Snowden took and gave to Greenwald. And even what we do know, there's some stuff I'm not sure should be pardoned. I had no problem with Snowden revealing the (in my opinion) unconstitutional spying the government was doing against American citizens. But he also revealed government operations against foreign citizens and governments that are not unconstitutional, not illegal, and in some cases necessary and beneficial operations of our government. I can sit on a jury and find someone who beat up an attacker not guilty of assault because their defensive actions were justified, but still convict them of theft for stealing the assailant's wallet after he knocked him out.
While an interesting topic for legal autists, I don't think anything like a state trial for a Presidential pardon recipient would ever happen. The district/state attorney would have to have a real bug up his ass to go after someone who had received personal Presidential attention. The political and public relations impact of such an effort would be messy.
There are other reasons for criminal punishment besides deterrence. One of the main ones is "removal." As in, this person has proven they are a danger to others and will be removed from society for a time so that they may not harm anyone else. Felon disenfranchisement is useful because the person has proven they are incapable of living by the rules of society, and so they should not have political power in society to shape the rules that they themselves refused to live by.
If we believe that person has changed and corrected their attitude, perhaps they can be re-enfranchised, of course. But deterrence is rarely effective for anything, as most criminals don't think they'll be caught, or are literally too stupid to engage in long-term planning to consider the consequences of getting caught.
being anti-PC largely seems to be the equivalent of being obnoxious and rude.
I've seen enough shrieking leftists furious that not everyone shares their PC delusions to know "obnoxious and rude" has nothing to do with what side of the political spectrum you're on.
When your little girl is playing pretty pretty princess tea party, you're an asshat if you walk up to her and say "you're not a fucking princess!"
However, if you're the one walking around telling all the other grown-ups "my daughter is a princess and you will refer to her as one at all times!" then you're the asshat.
Basically everyone involved is asshats. Probably the little girl, too.
To his face I'll call a man in a dress "her" to be polite, sure, but that doesn't make him a woman. For you to insist a man in a dress is a woman and I must believe it also or you'll find me in violation of "social rules" invokes a social rule for you: I get to think you're a meddling busybody on a power trip who wants to force your social/political beliefs on to me in order to feed your own ego.
Gail Ruben argued that gender was a social imposition rather than anything tied to biology, and she used the two words separately in her argument.
If sex and gender are biologically distinct, then the gender feelings would be a product of hormones. Doesn't that imply the societal gender roles are a product of different male and female behavior based on their hormones, and are therefore still tied to biology? Changing the biological source of gender from sexual organs to hormones doesn't make gender no longer biological and merely a social imposition.
But I don't think it's possible for economics to not be a concern. The "economy" is just the interactions of people exchanging resources, sometimes controlled by individuals, sometimes controlled by collectives. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum...it always serves some purpose to someone, even if people don't agree on the usefulness of the purpose (i.e., resources used to drop bombs on the middle east is wasteful from the point of view of the taxpayer but useful from the point of view of the bomb manufacturer). Star Trek handwaves away the economy by saying they don't have money any more...but then they're constantly visiting "mining colonies" or transporting medicines to stop a plague that for some reason they can't just replicate on the infected planet. And while everyone has free energy and wants for nothing you can replicate they never explain how they decide who gets the ocean front property with a view and who's stuck inland. They say they've risen above concerns like "money," but basically everyone you see who isn't in Starfleet is still behaving like someone participating in an economy.
The only way anyone will ever launch themselves 10,000 light years away is if all the resources needed to do so are essentially free, because it serves no purpose to anyone else (no return on investment, no political/PR utility). By the time that happens human society would be so radically different that who knows what we'd consider important.
Also we could hopefully find planets that could support life much closer. A 10 or 20 year journey (from earth's frame) is still perhaps useful in human time spans. For a look at a future like that, have you read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books? Very engaging, well-written books with fascinating characters and a space faring human civilization with as little magical physics as possible (i.e., no FTL*, 20-40+ years travel time between systems so the books span centuries).
* Well, there's one part in one book where they sort of try FTL but horrible things happen and it essentially breaks reality.
So, essentially after we've solved every other problem and are just bored we'll throw some people towards the other end of the galaxy. I can believe that.
I mostly agree with you, but you're leaving out the critical factor, which is the motivation for the people who stay behind on earth to develop and fund this project. The US got a return on the investment of going to the moon: USA #1 FUCK COMMIES. If we could establish a moon or mars base without breaking the bank it would be similarly useful. Commercialization of anything beyond satellites seems a long way off, but there are at least ideas in development about asteroid mining although the engineering challenges are still daunting. Everybody loves to talk about the trillions of tons of platinum in them thar asteroids, but they don't mention that minerals on earth have been concentrated by eons of geological, hydrological, and biological processes that didn't take place on a dead asteroid. There's tons of platinum! There's an atom over there and an atom over there and an atom over there...
But as far as launching an interstellar colony mission that will take 10k years (earth frame of reference), those people will have (figuratively) fallen out of the light cone of human civilization. Might as well have been swallowed by a black hole. No one will hear back from them for 20k years. No resources will ever be traded between the homeworld and the colony. There is no good PR, there is no ROI, just vast resources shot into space to be forgotten about after the next celebrity scandal knocks the launch out of the news cycle.
I imagine launching such a mission would be one of the most expensive endeavors in human history. And there is absolutely nothing in it for anyone who stays behind on earth, not even the satisfaction of "well at least somewhere else humans have survived if we all die" because everyone on earth who had any part in making the mission happen will have been dead for 10k years before the colonists arrive and 20k years before their descendents (twice as far removed from us as we are from the cavemen) could hear back.
Any attempt to fund such a mission will be met with very obvious responses: "that sounds neat, but what's in it for us? And don't we have plenty of other problems to which we could direct these resources?"
You would have to make it cheap enough that nobody cares that some nutjobs are taking off to the far corners of the galaxy on their own dime. And that ain't happening without new physics.
If the house were doing it knowingly and willingly to cheat the player they would lose their gambling license and be subject to all kinds of criminal laws and civil lawsuits. Any casino doing that would be mind-numblingly stupid because they don't need to cheat...the games are already in their favor so they'll win in the long run and over a large customer base. Cheating an individual player would be stupid, because one of those minimum wage casino employees would rat them out and there goes the gravy train.
The difference here is intent. The house didn't intentionally choose marked cards and use them to cheat the players. They didn't know the cards had an asymmetric pattern and didn't use that fact to cheat.
He's also a target of the Republican party... which I have NO idea why. I mean, aren't we supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs?
Is he? I can't recall ever hearing a Republican say anything cross about Musk. I will occasionally see libertarians roll their eyes at Musk fanboys because Musk relied so heavily on government subsidies, but that's about it. What are you talking about?
The Casino played with marked cards. He just noticed and used that to his advantage. If the house marks the cards, is it illegal to read the marks?
I think it's that gaming regulations do not allow games with marked cards to be played, regardless of who marks and who reads. So once it was determined the cards were "marked," the games themselves were void.
The only issue is, can Apple produce anything anyone wants to watch? That's the real trick.
It was telling he mentioned South Park. South Park was edgy counter culture 20 years ago. "Oh my God I can't believe they said that it's so irreverent lolololol!" But today they're doing the exact same "lol Trump is orange and doesn't really want to be president and is stupid ha ha ha" joke you find on every single late night comedy show. They were a counter culture and they became the culture.
The new counter culture is right wing, not lefty/libertarian. If they wanted something edgy and new that would get people talking it needs to be something the cultural establishment (college professors, the Daily Show, etc) would find outrageous and irresponsible, and that would be right wingers skewering the places where the cultural left has gone too far, and Apple is not going to air that kind of shit and weather the backlash from their hipster fan base.
But for a colony - why not ? You are taking people with you, you're taking your family, you aren't planning to ever come back. Who cares if ten-thousand years pass on earth during your 20 year journey ?
Economically, what's in it for the people left behind on Earth? Are the colonists themselves going to fully fund the expedition? Setting up a colony would be massively expensive. In the past empires created colonies to exploit them for resources and for strategic purposes in competition with other empires.
But for a colony that takes 10k years of travel time (from the Earth's frame of reference) they might as well cease to exist. 10k years is the about the entire age of civilization itself. Whoever contributed to their colonization mission will never trade with them, will never communicate with them. So for capitalists they will get no return on investment, and for governments they will get no PR boost. Besides some appeal to emotion about "the future of humanity" or wanting to LARP as Buck Rogers, what's the appeal of shipping people off 10k years into the future, never to be heard from again?
To achieve that, we'll have to give up tribalism in all its forms (ex. nationalism, religion), work together and pool resources.
So we have to stop being human.
You can't change human nature. We will always be tribal, because those who didn't care more about their in-group than the out-group got killed by the out-group and their genes were not passed along.
Instead of trying to change human nature and try to force everyone to pretend there are no more tribes, or that all tribes are the same, we acknowledge our differences and cooperate out of mutual self-interest?
So, what do you think the Europeans should have done when they discovered the New World? "Shit, captain, I see a bunch of fuckers in loin cloths on the beach. Looks like the place is full, guess we better fuck off back to Europe?"
that companies will simply pay the penalty because American workers just don't have the skills.
And Indians with fake degrees do? Something near half of our people with STEM degrees don't even work in STEM fields because of the shitty pay and working conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
But media heads would assplode, and both Trump and Putin love that shit.
We'll see what happens, but I give the odds of Putin handing Snowden over before Trump's first term is up to be 60/40.
I also think Trump would commute Snowden's sentence after a conviction, because it would be a popular move and Trump likes to do popular things that make the media irrationally angry.
And has led to some actual reforms.
Yes, now the contractors double up on a buddy system so they can watch each other to prevent future leaks about their continuing unconstitutional spying.
The same prosecutor who agreed to let him leave and then charged him as a fugitive.
Clarification: to my knowledge the prosecutor did not "agree to let him leave." The prosecutor at the time did not have legal cause to make him stay. "I can't stop you from leaving the country right now" is not the same thing as "I've determined you've not committed a crime and will not be charging you." Basically the same as yelling "AM I BEING DETAINED?!?" and the cop reluctantly agreeing he has no grounds to hold you right now even though he's sure you're the murderer and will be going to the DA and the judge for a warrant later. Also he was not "charged as a fugitive." He's wanted for an interview because the Swedish legal system is half inquisitorial, half adversarial (unlike the full adversarial US system). At first the investigators are seeking "truth," so they have to talk to the suspect before they are charged with a crime, unlike in the US where the cops and the DA are always trying to bust your ass.
So, they can't "charge" him until they talk to him, and once they charge him that sets in motion their "right to a speedy trial" laws which means there's no sense charging him unless they can get their hands on him back in Sweden. It's all a mess.
I don't see Russia reversing their position anytime soon so his involuntary return isn't looking all that likely..
Putin only kept Snowden to embarrass Obama. Now that Trump and Putin are buddies, I could well see him saying "as a sign of improving relations between our two great nations we return this criminal to you such that you may serve justice." And Trump has only ever referred to Snowden as a traitor.
I wouldn't be shocked if Trump pardoned Snowden, it would make Russia look good by justifying their harbouring of Snowden and it's just the sort of PR splash/distraction that Trump loves.
Trump has only ever referred to Snowden as a traitor. I think it's more likely Trump's pal Putin will say "As a sign of the improving relations between our two great nations, we return to you this criminal such that you may serve justice."
That said, Trump is also a populist and wants people to like him*. If enough people show enough support for Snowden, Trump may do exactly what Obama has done with Manning: a trial and a commuted sentence. My personal view of Snowden is mixed. I loved him when he blew the whistle on what are in my opinion unconstitutional programs that spy on the American people. But then he also revealed perfectly legal and constitutional programs in which the government was spying on foreigners and foreign governments. So I wouldn't mind a trail/conviction/commutation approach. I think that would satisfy the greatest number of people.
Not sure about Assange though, Trump's lovefest with Wikileaks will come to a very quick end if they ever dump something that he wants hidden. In fact, aiding the election of someone who's campaigned on the vilification of the press may be one of the more short-sighted things that Assange has done.
I think Assange was more interested in keeping Hillary, who wanted Assange drone striked, out of power than in helping Trump. Everyone seems to have done a 180 on Assange. Liberals loved him and conservatives hated him when he was leaking Iraq war military secrets but as soon as he started revealing the DNC's dirty laundry he became a scoundrel to the left and a hero to the right. My opinion of Assange never changed: Assange wants to save the world from powerful secret-keepers because Assange wants people to love him for saving the world. I have no doubt that if he gets dirt on any shady dealings of the Trump administration he'll leak those, too. Both left and right keep thinking Assange is on their side or against it, when no, Assange is on the side of Assange.
Also, Trump's not vilifying the press because it's "the press." He's vilifying the type of press that lies about stuff like CNN saying it's illegal to look at WikiLeaks. If the press would stop lying and taking sides while pretending to be honest and unbiased, well, then they'd be like WikiLeaks, honest brokers of information, and would be much more difficult to vilify.
* Yes, I know saying "Trump wants people to like him" doesn't make sense to liberals who hate him. But the whole story of the election is how out of touch the media and coastal elites are with the opinions of the common man. They kept thinking "kicking out illegal Mexican rapists" and "banning muslim immigration" would totally sink him because none of their friends think that way, but depending on how you ask the question you can get polling results of 60%+ who are pro-wall or pro-muslim ban. They're not unpopular opinions, just unpopular on TV.
Putin only kept Snowden to embarrass Obama. Now that Putin's pal Trump is about to take office, he may well say "As a sign of improving relations between our two great nations we return to you this criminal such that you may see justice done." The only things I've ever heard Trump say about Snowden are that he thinks he's a traitor. Snowden needs that Obama pardon PDQ.
So for example if he pardoned Snowden for crimes of espionage and leaking state secrets then isn't there a risk he could be charged still, for say, treason?
He wouldn't be pardoned for the crime he would be pardoned for the act. Rather, he would receive a blanket pardon for any criminal acts committed against the United States between such-and-such date and such-and-such date. So no, he wouldn't be tried for a different crime stemming from the same act. At least not by the federal government. If he committed a state crime the state could still try him, but in Snowden's case it's unlikely any of his actions violated state law, and even so it would be an incredible dick move and very disrespectful to the office of the Presidency (regardless of what anyone thinks of Obama). It would set a terrible precedent and would probably look like malicious prosecution.
I can see why, if this is the case, that Obama might want legal certainty on what he's actually pardoning before doing so even if other presidents may be a bit more laissez-faire about it.
I can see that. We also still don't know the extent of everything that Snowden took and gave to Greenwald. And even what we do know, there's some stuff I'm not sure should be pardoned. I had no problem with Snowden revealing the (in my opinion) unconstitutional spying the government was doing against American citizens. But he also revealed government operations against foreign citizens and governments that are not unconstitutional, not illegal, and in some cases necessary and beneficial operations of our government. I can sit on a jury and find someone who beat up an attacker not guilty of assault because their defensive actions were justified, but still convict them of theft for stealing the assailant's wallet after he knocked him out.
While an interesting topic for legal autists, I don't think anything like a state trial for a Presidential pardon recipient would ever happen. The district/state attorney would have to have a real bug up his ass to go after someone who had received personal Presidential attention. The political and public relations impact of such an effort would be messy.
There are other reasons for criminal punishment besides deterrence. One of the main ones is "removal." As in, this person has proven they are a danger to others and will be removed from society for a time so that they may not harm anyone else. Felon disenfranchisement is useful because the person has proven they are incapable of living by the rules of society, and so they should not have political power in society to shape the rules that they themselves refused to live by.
If we believe that person has changed and corrected their attitude, perhaps they can be re-enfranchised, of course. But deterrence is rarely effective for anything, as most criminals don't think they'll be caught, or are literally too stupid to engage in long-term planning to consider the consequences of getting caught.
being anti-PC largely seems to be the equivalent of being obnoxious and rude.
I've seen enough shrieking leftists furious that not everyone shares their PC delusions to know "obnoxious and rude" has nothing to do with what side of the political spectrum you're on.
When your little girl is playing pretty pretty princess tea party, you're an asshat if you walk up to her and say "you're not a fucking princess!"
However, if you're the one walking around telling all the other grown-ups "my daughter is a princess and you will refer to her as one at all times!" then you're the asshat.
Basically everyone involved is asshats. Probably the little girl, too.
To his face I'll call a man in a dress "her" to be polite, sure, but that doesn't make him a woman. For you to insist a man in a dress is a woman and I must believe it also or you'll find me in violation of "social rules" invokes a social rule for you: I get to think you're a meddling busybody on a power trip who wants to force your social/political beliefs on to me in order to feed your own ego.
Gail Ruben argued that gender was a social imposition rather than anything tied to biology, and she used the two words separately in her argument.
If sex and gender are biologically distinct, then the gender feelings would be a product of hormones. Doesn't that imply the societal gender roles are a product of different male and female behavior based on their hormones, and are therefore still tied to biology? Changing the biological source of gender from sexual organs to hormones doesn't make gender no longer biological and merely a social imposition.
if economics is the biggest concern
But I don't think it's possible for economics to not be a concern. The "economy" is just the interactions of people exchanging resources, sometimes controlled by individuals, sometimes controlled by collectives. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum...it always serves some purpose to someone, even if people don't agree on the usefulness of the purpose (i.e., resources used to drop bombs on the middle east is wasteful from the point of view of the taxpayer but useful from the point of view of the bomb manufacturer). Star Trek handwaves away the economy by saying they don't have money any more...but then they're constantly visiting "mining colonies" or transporting medicines to stop a plague that for some reason they can't just replicate on the infected planet. And while everyone has free energy and wants for nothing you can replicate they never explain how they decide who gets the ocean front property with a view and who's stuck inland. They say they've risen above concerns like "money," but basically everyone you see who isn't in Starfleet is still behaving like someone participating in an economy.
The only way anyone will ever launch themselves 10,000 light years away is if all the resources needed to do so are essentially free, because it serves no purpose to anyone else (no return on investment, no political/PR utility). By the time that happens human society would be so radically different that who knows what we'd consider important.
Also we could hopefully find planets that could support life much closer. A 10 or 20 year journey (from earth's frame) is still perhaps useful in human time spans. For a look at a future like that, have you read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books? Very engaging, well-written books with fascinating characters and a space faring human civilization with as little magical physics as possible (i.e., no FTL*, 20-40+ years travel time between systems so the books span centuries).
* Well, there's one part in one book where they sort of try FTL but horrible things happen and it essentially breaks reality.
So, essentially after we've solved every other problem and are just bored we'll throw some people towards the other end of the galaxy. I can believe that.
I mostly agree with you, but you're leaving out the critical factor, which is the motivation for the people who stay behind on earth to develop and fund this project. The US got a return on the investment of going to the moon: USA #1 FUCK COMMIES. If we could establish a moon or mars base without breaking the bank it would be similarly useful. Commercialization of anything beyond satellites seems a long way off, but there are at least ideas in development about asteroid mining although the engineering challenges are still daunting. Everybody loves to talk about the trillions of tons of platinum in them thar asteroids, but they don't mention that minerals on earth have been concentrated by eons of geological, hydrological, and biological processes that didn't take place on a dead asteroid. There's tons of platinum! There's an atom over there and an atom over there and an atom over there...
But as far as launching an interstellar colony mission that will take 10k years (earth frame of reference), those people will have (figuratively) fallen out of the light cone of human civilization. Might as well have been swallowed by a black hole. No one will hear back from them for 20k years. No resources will ever be traded between the homeworld and the colony. There is no good PR, there is no ROI, just vast resources shot into space to be forgotten about after the next celebrity scandal knocks the launch out of the news cycle.
I imagine launching such a mission would be one of the most expensive endeavors in human history. And there is absolutely nothing in it for anyone who stays behind on earth, not even the satisfaction of "well at least somewhere else humans have survived if we all die" because everyone on earth who had any part in making the mission happen will have been dead for 10k years before the colonists arrive and 20k years before their descendents (twice as far removed from us as we are from the cavemen) could hear back.
Any attempt to fund such a mission will be met with very obvious responses: "that sounds neat, but what's in it for us? And don't we have plenty of other problems to which we could direct these resources?"
You would have to make it cheap enough that nobody cares that some nutjobs are taking off to the far corners of the galaxy on their own dime. And that ain't happening without new physics.
If the house were doing it knowingly and willingly to cheat the player they would lose their gambling license and be subject to all kinds of criminal laws and civil lawsuits. Any casino doing that would be mind-numblingly stupid because they don't need to cheat...the games are already in their favor so they'll win in the long run and over a large customer base. Cheating an individual player would be stupid, because one of those minimum wage casino employees would rat them out and there goes the gravy train.
The difference here is intent. The house didn't intentionally choose marked cards and use them to cheat the players. They didn't know the cards had an asymmetric pattern and didn't use that fact to cheat.
But they have legendary IP. They just need out of the hardware market and to start making Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc games for other systems.
He's also a target of the Republican party... which I have NO idea why. I mean, aren't we supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs?
Is he? I can't recall ever hearing a Republican say anything cross about Musk. I will occasionally see libertarians roll their eyes at Musk fanboys because Musk relied so heavily on government subsidies, but that's about it. What are you talking about?
The Casino played with marked cards. He just noticed and used that to his advantage. If the house marks the cards, is it illegal to read the marks?
I think it's that gaming regulations do not allow games with marked cards to be played, regardless of who marks and who reads. So once it was determined the cards were "marked," the games themselves were void.
The only issue is, can Apple produce anything anyone wants to watch? That's the real trick.
It was telling he mentioned South Park. South Park was edgy counter culture 20 years ago. "Oh my God I can't believe they said that it's so irreverent lolololol!" But today they're doing the exact same "lol Trump is orange and doesn't really want to be president and is stupid ha ha ha" joke you find on every single late night comedy show. They were a counter culture and they became the culture.
The new counter culture is right wing, not lefty/libertarian. If they wanted something edgy and new that would get people talking it needs to be something the cultural establishment (college professors, the Daily Show, etc) would find outrageous and irresponsible, and that would be right wingers skewering the places where the cultural left has gone too far, and Apple is not going to air that kind of shit and weather the backlash from their hipster fan base.
But for a colony - why not ? You are taking people with you, you're taking your family, you aren't planning to ever come back. Who cares if ten-thousand years pass on earth during your 20 year journey ?
Economically, what's in it for the people left behind on Earth? Are the colonists themselves going to fully fund the expedition? Setting up a colony would be massively expensive. In the past empires created colonies to exploit them for resources and for strategic purposes in competition with other empires.
But for a colony that takes 10k years of travel time (from the Earth's frame of reference) they might as well cease to exist. 10k years is the about the entire age of civilization itself. Whoever contributed to their colonization mission will never trade with them, will never communicate with them. So for capitalists they will get no return on investment, and for governments they will get no PR boost. Besides some appeal to emotion about "the future of humanity" or wanting to LARP as Buck Rogers, what's the appeal of shipping people off 10k years into the future, never to be heard from again?
To achieve that, we'll have to give up tribalism in all its forms (ex. nationalism, religion), work together and pool resources.
So we have to stop being human.
You can't change human nature. We will always be tribal, because those who didn't care more about their in-group than the out-group got killed by the out-group and their genes were not passed along.
Instead of trying to change human nature and try to force everyone to pretend there are no more tribes, or that all tribes are the same, we acknowledge our differences and cooperate out of mutual self-interest?
So, what do you think the Europeans should have done when they discovered the New World? "Shit, captain, I see a bunch of fuckers in loin cloths on the beach. Looks like the place is full, guess we better fuck off back to Europe?"
that companies will simply pay the penalty because American workers just don't have the skills.
And Indians with fake degrees do? Something near half of our people with STEM degrees don't even work in STEM fields because of the shitty pay and working conditions.