No, Im asking why there is a double standard whereby you can "ethically" refuse to patronize a business whose beliefs you disagree with, but they cannot ethically refuse to service you.
Then, quite honestly, you're an idiot.
Name me ONE other context in which a business owner can refuse to serve someone. The reality is there simply aren't any. There is no equivalent for of saying "we don't serve your kind here" which is legal. None. Nanda. Zip.
You're insisting that you have the right to force other people to violate their beliefs to fit your whims.
No, I'm saying that the rules under which you can legally run a business say there is no mechanism for them to say they are unwilling to serve someone, and if those people can't deal with it they shouldn't be running businesses.
You can't refuse to serve someone who is black, or Chinese, or because of their religion, or any other damned reason. It simply doesn't exist as a legal right.
If your puny little religious mind thinks you deserve to be able to refuse service, then you should be 100% OK with someone being able to say "we don't serve Christians". If not, you're completely full of shit.
If you think your religion gives you a special place in law, you're just a hypocritical asshole. We don't want Sharia law any more than we want Christian law.
Go stone your own damned selves and leave the rest of us out of this. Giving additional rights to religious people just because of their religion is exceptionalism and bullshit.
Operating a business isn't a right. And having the legal ability to refuse to people when you run a business sure as fuck isn't a right. So if your religion is incompatible with running a business which serves the public... that's your fucking problem.
I content that as long as religious people hold a legal distinction which prevents other people from discriminating against them, that religious people should hold no special ability to refuse service based on their beliefs.
If religious people wish to hold a special right to discriminate, they should themselves lose any right to be protected from discrimination. Or they should shut the fuck up.
You can believe any damned thing you like, but the right to refuse service to a customer is a right NOBODY else has, which means religious people are asking to hold both a protected place in society, and enjoy rights nobody else has.
You want to know hypocrisy? It's someone who wants to use their legally protected status which prevents them from being discriminated against to claim the right to discriminate against someone else.
The stupidity of the argument which says "you are free to not patronize a business which can legally refuse to serve you" is moronic and full of hypocrisy. It draws a false equivalence which says "you are bad to refuse to buy from assholes who want the legal right to refuse to serve you".
If these people want the right to refuse service, they should all be in favor of losing their right to be discriminated against... or they're just full of shit assholes who think themselves special.
In which case they're no better than the Taliban or ISIL... it's just people claiming their religion gives them the right to do anything they so choose.
I take that name to read "we're just a greedy corporation who pretends we have a privacy policy and a track record which says we care, but we actually are just a member of an industry trade group who wants to give the illusion of being trustworthy and avoiding regulation".
I view TRUSTe as being more or less not trustworthy at all.
TRUSTe is nothing more than an industry trade group who has consistently failed to live up to their promise, and are more interested in protecting their members than consumers.
Well, it's not like you can expect Carly Fiorina to know how to run a massive multi-national company in anything but the most superficial sense... because she was pretty much incompetent.
What she is doing is speaking to her own perceived base who feel it should be a religious right to discriminate. And in that group, someone who will defend their right to be assholes is someone to listen to.
But, sometimes Republicans have a difficult time understanding the actual meaning of "hypocrisy", because they're among the first people to boycott and demand the head of someone they disagree with... and then when they get boycotted they shriek about their free speech.
Collectively they seem to think free speech means they get to say whatever they feel, but people who disagree with them should be silenced. So, the hypocrisy is kind of innate.
That wasn't high frequency trading, it was bad loans. Bad loans to people who wanted to buy houses. So the greedy children who just had to have that house they couldn't afford caused an economic crash. The clowns just let them do it.
It wasn't only bad loans.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment, and then hoodwinked the rest of the world into buying it. It was a scam on a massive scale.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to, and the lied to everybody else as they pawned off the debt.
It was a fucking pyramid scheme, ran by con artists, and then foisted off onto everybody else.
Had it only been bad loans, the idiots who made those loans would have been the ones to get hurt. But this was basically kiting checks and outright falsifying documents.
This wasn't caused by people who bought houses they couldn't afford. This was theft by the financial industry to cover their own stupid losses.
The scam could only have worked because the ratings agencies are complete whores who don't actually do anything meaningful other than "if you pay us, we'll say anything you want".
In my anecdotal experience, I have seen a couple of places where the conversation goes something like...
A: Do you know what you're doing? B: Sure, I googled it last night, no problem Crash
It seems that, more than reading a book or any other way, people overestimate how much they know after googling.
I don't think it's the material, I think it's the medium, and people just more superficially skim stuff on the internet.
I'm not saying you can't learn things from the internet. But for the lazy among us it's too easy to think you learned more than you did.
I suspect many of us have witnessed that, and in many cases done it ourselves.
Hell, I've even seen TV commercials by companies which basically say "just because you read a web page, doesn't mean you can replace a professional". Which means SOMEONE else is clearly aware of this. So it's not like this isn't something which has been observed for some time.
Well, think about it... say you could pretty much push the value of any stock by 1% just by having your idiot boxes start actively trading.
If you're the brokerage house, you can make a lot of money by planning to cause the price to briefly blip and then make money on the differences.
A brokerage house shouldn't be able to change the price of a stock like that.
Doing it based on a joke tells me just how damned broken that method of trading is. And since all of the trading houses have these algorithms, it's not unprecedented for them to set off a chain reaction.
Basically a bunch of self-serving greedy bastards can materially impact the stock market any time they like.. even if they don't intend to. All to try to rip off money from the market
In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor
Holy crap. someone should get Captain Obvious up here on the double to point out that water is wet.
Reading a web page doesn't make you an expert.
I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge, but I guess common knowledge is purely anecdotal until someone does a study and confirms it. Which, is it'self common knowledge.:-P
There are also companies who specialize in getting Americans into Cuba which can be used, though with modern air-travel information sharing and the necessity to fly over US airspace you might get noticed (they have to give the passenger manifest to the Americans).
A bunch of years ago my cousin was on a resort with what was obviously an American pretending to be Canadian -- he kept saying he was from the "State of Alberta", thereby marking himself as decidedly NOT a Canadian.
Honestly though, Cuba has grown their major airport, and are trying to ramp up tourism, but in many ways they just don't have the ability to scale up much more. The airport can devolve into pretty much chaos and they can be overwhelmed on a day with lots of flights -- and in some cases they can have people arriving at resorts when the resort doesn't know they're coming, and then they don't have rooms.
Increasingly, depending on where you're coming from and how long you're going to be there... we've found some rentals in Florida can be cost-competitive with Cuba, and you don't need to worry about mystery bugs and food issues. Do your own all-inclusive vacation and buy your own groceries and the like.
The last few times we were there we found that the resorts were strained to the point of starting to have pretty lousy service.
I like Cuba, quite a lot actually, but there's some aspects of travelling there that I could do without... Florida is actually becoming our preferred destination now. A sudden influx of even more tourists will speed that along.
One of the problems Cuba still faces, and will continue to do, is not everybody gets anywhere near that money.
Some of the people who work on resorts probably bring in more in tips in a few days than most Cubans will make in a month.
The people who own cabs and the like probably do pretty well.
But you can quickly get to the people who even by Cuban standards are barely scraping by, and are essentially just begging from the tourists.
Normalizing trade with the US stands to have the potential to leave even more people who are completely poor and not going to benefit from this.. and might in the long run do even worse.
Companies like AirBNB are only interested in their own bottom line, and simply do not give a shit if what they're doing actually is a net benefit for Cubans.
So when they tout how awesome their service will be and what it will do, I largely treat that as corporate bullshit and PR. Just like the puffery from every other tech company.
Ever read any other press releases coming out of China?
They very often miss the point, and just fall back to "this is true because we say it is".
The "rights and interests" of users is to not be spoofed. The users in China don't have a "right" to use a google product which has been hacked, and the CNNIC doesn't have a "right" to issue fake certificates.
Some of it is swagger, but from people who are used to being able to wave their collective dicks around and have that influence reality. Now, they've come up against an entity who says "we simply don't care what you want to claim, this is what's happening".
This article tells us nothing, and as usual, it's someone gushing about how technology which isn't widely available yet is going to be super awesome and change our lives. Hell, it boils down to two quotes
It's the usual babble from futurists and other people who claim to be Really Sure that this is what we'll all be doing in a few years.
It reads like it was written by an excited cheerleader, and is about as substantial.
I remain highly skeptical that anything but a small fraction of people will ever own an autonomous car. I'm betting for the foreseeable future it will remain the plaything of the wealthy and tech companies, but in the end nobody cares enough to spend their own money on one.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, space taxis, and every other thing which has sounded cool at the time but never actually went anywhere.
So, the US has decided they will apply penalties/punishment for people who break into their computers.
But the US has decided they can break into any and all computers.
On behalf of the part of the world who thinks you shouldn't have access to our communications... what the hell gives you the right to penalize someone for things you openly do? Why are attacks against you special?
Why does American foreign policy boil down to "we are special because we're Americans", and why the hell should the rest of the world agree to this bullshit?
If America has decreed they can break into any system legally for any reasons of their choosing.. America needs to accept the fact that is true of any country (or possibly individual) in the world.
Unless somehow it's magically different, because 'Murica.
Tell me again why I am paying $60 for a new release on Steam that didn't have to get stamped, packaged, stored and shipped to a store for someone to place on a shelf for me to purchase yet costs the same?
Due to a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value (and in acknowledgement of the escalating costs of executive bonuses, cocaine, and hookers) to maximize out synergies and leverage existing payment schemes the board has elected to treat virtual goods as costing the same as physical goods.
The consumer, having been conditioned to expect to pay these prices, will contribute to high-margin sales.
We disagree with market assessments which indicate that diminishing scarcity should also cause downward pressure on prices, as we feel we would be unable to maintain current levels of executive compensation if we were forced to pursue new revenue models. Instead we will continue with established pricing in order to ensure maximal revenues are accrued.
Further, pursuant to discussions at the board level, we continue to pursue mechanisms by which consumers^Wrevenue cows will be required to simply remit 25% of their income to us.
To this end, the fraudulent use of the greatly expanded copyright protection regime will continue to be applied as long as suckers^Wrevenue cows can be coerced into complying.
Forecast estimates indicate we may need to increase bribed^Whonorariums to lawmakers by a small percentage, but this is expected to be offset by existing revenue bloating^Wmaximizing schemes.
Slashdot Mirror
No actual guns blazed in this scenario. Lots of people milled about, but not a single shot was fired.
Did you have some kind of point to make?
Then, quite honestly, you're an idiot.
Name me ONE other context in which a business owner can refuse to serve someone. The reality is there simply aren't any. There is no equivalent for of saying "we don't serve your kind here" which is legal. None. Nanda. Zip.
No, I'm saying that the rules under which you can legally run a business say there is no mechanism for them to say they are unwilling to serve someone, and if those people can't deal with it they shouldn't be running businesses.
You can't refuse to serve someone who is black, or Chinese, or because of their religion, or any other damned reason. It simply doesn't exist as a legal right.
If your puny little religious mind thinks you deserve to be able to refuse service, then you should be 100% OK with someone being able to say "we don't serve Christians". If not, you're completely full of shit.
If you think your religion gives you a special place in law, you're just a hypocritical asshole. We don't want Sharia law any more than we want Christian law.
Go stone your own damned selves and leave the rest of us out of this. Giving additional rights to religious people just because of their religion is exceptionalism and bullshit.
Operating a business isn't a right. And having the legal ability to refuse to people when you run a business sure as fuck isn't a right. So if your religion is incompatible with running a business which serves the public ... that's your fucking problem.
Some of us would argue that in practice it is neither of those things, and that while it sounds great on paper, has little to do with actual reality.
I content that as long as religious people hold a legal distinction which prevents other people from discriminating against them, that religious people should hold no special ability to refuse service based on their beliefs.
If religious people wish to hold a special right to discriminate, they should themselves lose any right to be protected from discrimination. Or they should shut the fuck up.
You can believe any damned thing you like, but the right to refuse service to a customer is a right NOBODY else has, which means religious people are asking to hold both a protected place in society, and enjoy rights nobody else has.
You want to know hypocrisy? It's someone who wants to use their legally protected status which prevents them from being discriminated against to claim the right to discriminate against someone else.
The stupidity of the argument which says "you are free to not patronize a business which can legally refuse to serve you" is moronic and full of hypocrisy. It draws a false equivalence which says "you are bad to refuse to buy from assholes who want the legal right to refuse to serve you".
If these people want the right to refuse service, they should all be in favor of losing their right to be discriminated against ... or they're just full of shit assholes who think themselves special.
In which case they're no better than the Taliban or ISIL ... it's just people claiming their religion gives them the right to do anything they so choose.
You DO understand that "Carly" is a she, right?
This isn't some guy named Carl.
Sorry, but you actually put any trust in TRUSTe?
I take that name to read "we're just a greedy corporation who pretends we have a privacy policy and a track record which says we care, but we actually are just a member of an industry trade group who wants to give the illusion of being trustworthy and avoiding regulation".
I view TRUSTe as being more or less not trustworthy at all.
TRUSTe is nothing more than an industry trade group who has consistently failed to live up to their promise, and are more interested in protecting their members than consumers.
Well, it's not like you can expect Carly Fiorina to know how to run a massive multi-national company in anything but the most superficial sense ... because she was pretty much incompetent.
What she is doing is speaking to her own perceived base who feel it should be a religious right to discriminate. And in that group, someone who will defend their right to be assholes is someone to listen to.
But, sometimes Republicans have a difficult time understanding the actual meaning of "hypocrisy", because they're among the first people to boycott and demand the head of someone they disagree with ... and then when they get boycotted they shriek about their free speech.
Collectively they seem to think free speech means they get to say whatever they feel, but people who disagree with them should be silenced. So, the hypocrisy is kind of innate.
LOL, I assumed you were joking until I checked back on the site.
That's awesome, I may have to add this to my daily sites.
It wasn't only bad loans.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment, and then hoodwinked the rest of the world into buying it. It was a scam on a massive scale.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to, and the lied to everybody else as they pawned off the debt.
It was a fucking pyramid scheme, ran by con artists, and then foisted off onto everybody else.
Had it only been bad loans, the idiots who made those loans would have been the ones to get hurt. But this was basically kiting checks and outright falsifying documents.
This wasn't caused by people who bought houses they couldn't afford. This was theft by the financial industry to cover their own stupid losses.
The scam could only have worked because the ratings agencies are complete whores who don't actually do anything meaningful other than "if you pay us, we'll say anything you want".
In my anecdotal experience, I have seen a couple of places where the conversation goes something like ...
A: Do you know what you're doing?
B: Sure, I googled it last night, no problem
Crash
It seems that, more than reading a book or any other way, people overestimate how much they know after googling.
I don't think it's the material, I think it's the medium, and people just more superficially skim stuff on the internet.
I'm not saying you can't learn things from the internet. But for the lazy among us it's too easy to think you learned more than you did.
I suspect many of us have witnessed that, and in many cases done it ourselves.
Hell, I've even seen TV commercials by companies which basically say "just because you read a web page, doesn't mean you can replace a professional". Which means SOMEONE else is clearly aware of this. So it's not like this isn't something which has been observed for some time.
On Wall Street? Of course they're taking a bump.
Wait, we are talking about cocaine, right?
And, for anybody who hasn't thought of this ... don't take random financial advice from the internet, talk to a professional.
There are quite a few scenarios in which indexed funds took a complete bath with the downturn in oil.
Indexing is no magic bullet either, just a bet that in the long term things go up and keep doing so.
Well, think about it ... say you could pretty much push the value of any stock by 1% just by having your idiot boxes start actively trading.
If you're the brokerage house, you can make a lot of money by planning to cause the price to briefly blip and then make money on the differences.
A brokerage house shouldn't be able to change the price of a stock like that.
Doing it based on a joke tells me just how damned broken that method of trading is. And since all of the trading houses have these algorithms, it's not unprecedented for them to set off a chain reaction.
Basically a bunch of self-serving greedy bastards can materially impact the stock market any time they like .. even if they don't intend to. All to try to rip off money from the market
So the stock market is being actively manipulated by idiots?
As usual, these people are just parasites on the financial system looking to skim off money before everyone else has a chance.
High frequency trading is essentially skimming off the top for yourself without having done ANYTHING other than having a faster connection.
I hope these clowns bankrupt themselves one day with their stupidity.
Holy crap. someone should get Captain Obvious up here on the double to point out that water is wet.
Reading a web page doesn't make you an expert.
I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge, but I guess common knowledge is purely anecdotal until someone does a study and confirms it. Which, is it'self common knowledge. :-P
There are also companies who specialize in getting Americans into Cuba which can be used, though with modern air-travel information sharing and the necessity to fly over US airspace you might get noticed (they have to give the passenger manifest to the Americans).
A bunch of years ago my cousin was on a resort with what was obviously an American pretending to be Canadian -- he kept saying he was from the "State of Alberta", thereby marking himself as decidedly NOT a Canadian.
Honestly though, Cuba has grown their major airport, and are trying to ramp up tourism, but in many ways they just don't have the ability to scale up much more. The airport can devolve into pretty much chaos and they can be overwhelmed on a day with lots of flights -- and in some cases they can have people arriving at resorts when the resort doesn't know they're coming, and then they don't have rooms.
Increasingly, depending on where you're coming from and how long you're going to be there ... we've found some rentals in Florida can be cost-competitive with Cuba, and you don't need to worry about mystery bugs and food issues. Do your own all-inclusive vacation and buy your own groceries and the like.
The last few times we were there we found that the resorts were strained to the point of starting to have pretty lousy service.
I like Cuba, quite a lot actually, but there's some aspects of travelling there that I could do without ... Florida is actually becoming our preferred destination now. A sudden influx of even more tourists will speed that along.
One of the problems Cuba still faces, and will continue to do, is not everybody gets anywhere near that money.
Some of the people who work on resorts probably bring in more in tips in a few days than most Cubans will make in a month.
The people who own cabs and the like probably do pretty well.
But you can quickly get to the people who even by Cuban standards are barely scraping by, and are essentially just begging from the tourists.
Normalizing trade with the US stands to have the potential to leave even more people who are completely poor and not going to benefit from this .. and might in the long run do even worse.
Companies like AirBNB are only interested in their own bottom line, and simply do not give a shit if what they're doing actually is a net benefit for Cubans.
So when they tout how awesome their service will be and what it will do, I largely treat that as corporate bullshit and PR. Just like the puffery from every other tech company.
So basically if China allowed HHTPS a non-Chinese server wouldn't have been DDoS'd.
Like China will give a crap about that.
Ever read any other press releases coming out of China?
They very often miss the point, and just fall back to "this is true because we say it is".
The "rights and interests" of users is to not be spoofed. The users in China don't have a "right" to use a google product which has been hacked, and the CNNIC doesn't have a "right" to issue fake certificates.
Some of it is swagger, but from people who are used to being able to wave their collective dicks around and have that influence reality. Now, they've come up against an entity who says "we simply don't care what you want to claim, this is what's happening".
This article tells us nothing, and as usual, it's someone gushing about how technology which isn't widely available yet is going to be super awesome and change our lives. Hell, it boils down to two quotes
It's the usual babble from futurists and other people who claim to be Really Sure that this is what we'll all be doing in a few years.
It reads like it was written by an excited cheerleader, and is about as substantial.
I remain highly skeptical that anything but a small fraction of people will ever own an autonomous car. I'm betting for the foreseeable future it will remain the plaything of the wealthy and tech companies, but in the end nobody cares enough to spend their own money on one.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, space taxis, and every other thing which has sounded cool at the time but never actually went anywhere.
So, the US has decided they will apply penalties/punishment for people who break into their computers.
But the US has decided they can break into any and all computers.
On behalf of the part of the world who thinks you shouldn't have access to our communications ... what the hell gives you the right to penalize someone for things you openly do? Why are attacks against you special?
Why does American foreign policy boil down to "we are special because we're Americans", and why the hell should the rest of the world agree to this bullshit?
If America has decreed they can break into any system legally for any reasons of their choosing .. America needs to accept the fact that is true of any country (or possibly individual) in the world.
Unless somehow it's magically different, because 'Murica.
Due to a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value (and in acknowledgement of the escalating costs of executive bonuses, cocaine, and hookers) to maximize out synergies and leverage existing payment schemes the board has elected to treat virtual goods as costing the same as physical goods.
The consumer, having been conditioned to expect to pay these prices, will contribute to high-margin sales.
We disagree with market assessments which indicate that diminishing scarcity should also cause downward pressure on prices, as we feel we would be unable to maintain current levels of executive compensation if we were forced to pursue new revenue models. Instead we will continue with established pricing in order to ensure maximal revenues are accrued.
Further, pursuant to discussions at the board level, we continue to pursue mechanisms by which consumers^Wrevenue cows will be required to simply remit 25% of their income to us.
To this end, the fraudulent use of the greatly expanded copyright protection regime will continue to be applied as long as suckers^Wrevenue cows can be coerced into complying.
Forecast estimates indicate we may need to increase bribed^Whonorariums to lawmakers by a small percentage, but this is expected to be offset by existing revenue bloating^Wmaximizing schemes.
Short version: greedy fucking douchebags.
No, essentially it's "name that sci-fi plot".
It's not a joke. It's not a hoax. It isn't plausible. It isn't cute. It isn't funny.
It's pathetic.
Look, your penis is tiny, and you're incompetent as an "editor", we get it.
But show a little originality and variety. You've basically made the same joke about 10 times now.
I see the humor is weak in this one.
Sorry, son, but I've had my geek card for over 30 years now. Nobody gets to take it back.
I'm all for some good humor, but what soulskill is doing is beyond lame.
April fools day is about hoaxes and pranks ... not thinly disguised click-bait and attention whoring by a lame editor who thinks he's funny.
The BCC convincing people about the annual spaghetti harvest? Priceless, timeless, and awesome.
Ten stories which are blatant references to popular fiction? A pathetic cry for help (or, in this case, ad revenue).
These are so damned weak as to just be pointless. Like I said, knock knock jokes from a 4 year old.