Well, not all of them, but I'm sadly sure that some criminals will be willing to take advantage of the situation. Of course the most serious threat is that the extremely black-hat hackers will exploit the unlocked WiFi networks to pwn routers and linked computers for later abuse. In accord with Dan Ariely's research, the criminals will think they are being relatively nice guys by saving their major depredations until after the immediate emergency has been addressed.
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/f... is a quasi-review of one of his books about dishonesty, even including an honest email exchange...
However, I think it would be much better if we did it the other way around. Rather than maximizing the profits of the big Internet companies, we should always be configured to run as much of the infrastructure as possible on our own systems. In other words, WiFi routers would normally be configured for safe sharing, and handling emergencies would just be a natural extension of wireless communications that the big Internet companies are not controlling and profiting from.
Punchline is that profit is not the primary driver of the bad design. It's all about controlling our communications. I think the primary driver for centralized control of the Internet is the governments. They WANT the rules and laws to work that way. If things got out of control, if the peasants were actually in charge of the Internet, how would they control the peasants? Real democracy scares them more than anything.
Trying to decide whether or not to name names, but in a sense it doesn't matter. As near as I can tell, ALL companies hate old employees. Various companies have various reasons, but I think high-tech companies (like HP and my former employer) might be the most hateful.
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology. Even if the old folks are willing to work as cheaply as fresh hires, and even if the old folks are fast learners, salary cuts are intrinsically demotivating. You can try disguises like "declining health", but they don't work well and job satisfaction tends to decline. Anyway, the bean counters at the top prefer fresh meat. Cheap.
In Japan the situation is especially critical because the demographic transition is resulting in lots of old people and very few young ones. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has actually put out "guidelines" that strongly encourage companies to keep older employers who want to work until at least age 65, but the companies are just playing games with the rules.
Without naming names, I'm going to try to summarize "a friend's" experiences. For brevity, AF. The managers started pressuring AF to retire around 55, but AF declined. AF's job and working conditions were steadily made worse and then AF was shoved out the door ASAP, which was AF's 60th birthday. The MHLW had a response. Rough translation: "They aren't supposed to do that if AF wanted to keep working, but tough titties."
Anyway, I'm just an old philosopher, so I get to say "That's too bad" to AF. In philosophic terms, there are four quadrants to consider. Everyone wants to be in Q1 with good work and good compensation, and no one wants to be in Q4 with bad work and bad pay. The interesting cases are Q2, good work with bad pay, and Q3, bad work with good pay. AF wanted Q1 or Q2, but got shoved into Q3 and then Q4.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness. Insofar as most of my career was spent in Q1 and Q2, I can't complain too much. However, at this point it appears that my best outcome is to pass away before I exhaust my savings. I would contribute more to the economy if my new focus wasn't on minimizing my expenses, eh? You'd think the companies might be smart enough to worry about the loss of business from all of those penny-pinching retirees, but they obviously aren't that smart.
I really do have to feel sorry for people like you. Why are you so desperate to hate Hillary? Why are you twisting your entire mentality around justifying your numerous hatreds?
Thank gawd someone like you can't understand me. It makes me feel rather happy. Well, at least relieved.
Another one of those backward thinking results. People like you make Hillary look good and worth supporting. The extremists haters are quite probably the #2 reason that Hillary may win.
Of course the #1 reason is the Donald. It would be hilarious if they produced some examples of Trump's email to show him mixing his personal and business affairs. Then we could watch you Hillary haters going through fresh mental gymnastics explaining why it's completely different when Trump does it.
Hmm... But the problem is that the Constitution defines the presidential election process in a winner-take-all way. That means that attacking Hillary, even by merely accepting and propagating the slander against her, is increasing the likelihood of the other winner.
In a winner-take-all election system there are only two stable states: Two balanced teams (parties) compete for the bulk of the voters in the middle, or one team has a permanent dominance of the game. In a sense the openness of the system actually makes it worse, because whatever technique works for one side will tend to be adopted by the other, and principles and philosophies be darned. I suppose the sad joke is that the founders feared the idea of political parties precisely because they expected the parties to put their partisan interests ahead of the nation's concerns--and I think the results have shown their fears were extremely well considered and justified.
If they had been even more innovative than they were, then they might have come up with the coalition solution, but they had their limits and that idea didn't come up until later. Nor could they anticipate the appearance of computerized gerrymandering...
Okay, so now you are accusing your boss of being an inhuman monster and apparently trying to gain my sympathy for your sad work situation.
But mostly you're just proving my point that most of Hillary's enemies are nuts and will go to ANY length to attack her. I didn't like Hillary much, but I'm beginning to love her for her enemies. I have this visceral thing against liars, and her enemies are clearly the biggest liars in that valley.
After MILLIONS of dollars spent looking for smoke, her enemies have come up with nothing. Not for a lack of sincere effort and massive wastes of taxpayers' money. No, you can't prove a negative, but at some point the sane people are going to say there just isn't any fire there.
Let's start with the hypothesis that Hillary had committed some crime. Millions of dollars have been spent investigating EVERY aspect of her life seeking evidence to convict her, and yet she remains unconvicted. The investigations are driven by people who are highly motivated and extremely hostile. Sometimes even insanely hostile. And yet, no conviction after MANY years of effort.
No, you cannot prove a negative, but at some point you have to say that the preponderance of the evidence is that she's been been careful enough in following the actual laws. Lawyers tend to be like that, and I do think that her primary personal identity is probably "lawyer" or "corporate lawyer". I wish it was "philosopher" or even "statesman", but I'm not holding my breath, especially after Citizens United. (On the rapidly growing list of bad decisions from the Supreme Court, I think that one is already near the top.) I still don't like lawyers.
Now let's consider examples of Trump saying insane things. How do you feel about the idea that Mexico is sending rapists to America? Something is insane about that idea. Do you want more examples? (Oh, and by the way, quite a number of psychologists and psychiatrists have said that they think there might be something wrong with the Donald.) Maybe you're imagination is too limited, but I can certainly imagine Trump coming out against guns--but only AFTER he's in the White House. If he did it before the election, then that would convince me that either he is insane or his entire campaign has been a sham.
I can't figure out which of my points you are trying to prove. Hillary haters are insane haters? Trump supporters are insane haters? Or perhaps the confusion is because you are both?
Or perhaps it was just a joke? However I also think that "Nuclear Pacification" isn't funny.
And you have never had to send an email message to your boss so you could take care of your child? Either you are a lifeless and inhuman bastard or you are so desperate to attack Hillary that you lie and demean yourself. Possibly both, now that I think about it.
I rather wish I had complete access to all of your email. I bet you would not like that very much.
And there is NEVER any relationship between the two?
Let's pretend you have an actual life. Perhaps you have a spouse and a child? Have you ever sent an email message to your boss about needing to take a day off so you can be with your child?
If your answer is no, then I think you are an inhuman bastard.
If your answer is yes, then you were lying. Why are you so desperate to attack Hillary that you demean yourself?
I actually find the situation rather laughable. I don't like Hillary, but her most vocal enemies are so vile that I am actually beginning to like her quite a bit. That obviously does not seem to be their intention.
As regards the presidency, some people seem to think it's supposed to be some sort of gawd. NO human being is qualified for such a job. I think it was really a shame that Ford pardoned Nixon because the job of president has become insane and really needs to be dragged all the way down to earth and buried in mud for a while. Maybe that is Trump's real plan?
Sorry, completely unpersuasive response. Not one actual crime? Just your feeling that she is a secret enemy of the Constitution?
If you are so sincerely afraid of someone taking your guns away that it overwhelms all other factors, then there really isn't much to say to you. However, even if you do sincerely believe that such a thing is possible in America, then it seems obvious you should only be afraid of a madman trying it.
No, I'm not convinced that Trump is insane, but sometimes he definitely says things that are insane. However, I still think he might be faking them and just playing to his fans. If he is faking, then the main danger is he starts believing himself. If he actually is insane, then of course all bets are off.
Hillary has said plenty of things I don't agree with, even things I strongly disagree with, but I can't point at anything insane. Her critics, on the other hand...
Hmm... Okay, I'm pert' shure I should stop there, but I'm going to say something about the 2nd Amendment: President Lincoln already repealed it. Myself, I don't much care, and I served in the military and owned guns when I lived in Texas, but even in those days I knew that the 2nd Amendment had been effectively repealed by the Civil War. However, I still think it was primarily a war of the Northern bankers against the Southern debtors and slavery was largely an excuse (to claim the moral high ground) and partly a cause (due to the economic inefficiency of slave labor that caused the debt). I think the human and economic cost of the Civil War was certainly not justified by any need to protect the bankers from default. Those high costs were why the Southern states believed the North would be insane to interfere with slavery--as long as they had the armed militias of the 2nd Amendment, but the outcome of the Civil War did finally settle the slavery question that had bothered the nation since its founding. To add insult to injury, those same Northern bankers supported and profited from the war profiteers. Or maybe the main insult is that their descendents are now supporting the so-called Republican Party?
If you study the history of those years, the entire point of the 2nd Amendment was NOT the personal and individual right to arms, but the independence and sovereignty of the individual states to be enforced by the states' well-regulated militias. The Bill of Rights was only tacked onto the Constitution at the last minute to persuade the states to ratify it.
You seem like a rational sort of fellow, so I'm going to ask why you think Hillary is such a terrible person?
Can you provide some concrete evidence of a terrible crime she has committed?
One solid case would be enough to significantly influence my opinion of her. However, I have had no problem in finding many accusations, and all of them have turned out to be partisan or baseless or both. (Well, actually a few of them are accusations of the form of "She's not perfect", but no one is.)
Or are you just accepting the framing of a false narrative? Has Hillary stopped beating her husband yet?
Let me be clear that I do not love Hillary Clinton. Nor do I hate her. I do not like lawyers, but given that lawyers wrote the election laws, there's a bias there. I do not like dynasties, but (1) she's only a Clinton by marriage, (2) a founder is not yet a dynasty, and (3) she has accomplished enough on her own that she can legitimately claim to be her own woman.
She is not a witch. I don't think ANYONE is really qualified for the monstrosity that today's presidency has become, but I've convinced she's at least as qualified as any of the American presidents of my lifetime as of their election, and far more qualified than Dubya was.
(Not really relevant, but I think Trump is the least qualified candidate I've ever seen, with the possible exceptions of Dan Quayle (intellectually unfit) or the big dick Cheney (morally unfit).)
Do you completely separate your personal email from the work-related email? Have you ever mentioned work-related items in personal correspondence? Have you ever mentioned personal matters in work email?
You are living in a glass house, my friend. What's with all the stones?
On the Trump aspect, I'm not sure. The problem with trying to assess a con man and liar is that there is no evidence in his statements about what he actually believes. I am not convinced that Trump is "completely out of touch with reality". He might be lying about that, too, and merely exploiting the insanity of other people. Right now I'm inclined towards the theory that he does feed off the crowd, and he might even be something of a method actor, and while he's on stage he tries to convince himself of the reality of the role he is playing. If that theory is correct, then when Trump is on stage in front of a mob of angry racists, then he sincerely becomes a racist, but he might shake it off as soon as he returns to his dressing room. But shake it off completely? With no residual mental damage or side effects in the form of mental aberrations? That seems REALLY hard to believe, even compared to some of Trump's flaming lies.
There were only two comments moderated as "insightful", and neither of them deserved to be. Accepting the brokenness of the slashdot moderation system, I did some textual searches of the comments and also came up dry.
There are some deep issues here, and I think that there was a time when slashdot (in a collective sense) would have been capable of addressing some of them. "Trump is a con man" and "Hillary is a witch" are NOT deep issues.
I think there are two most important issues here. One is the partisan abuse of power. Using the FBI for partisan witch hunts is bad enough, but I think the focus of Congress on partisan scheming and advertising is much more serious. There are actual national problems that the Congress could be working on.
However, for now I'm primarily going to focus on the second issue, which I can summarize as "Nobody's perfect." If you (or I) were subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny that Hillary Clinton has received, that scrutiny would turn up plenty of "evidence" of all sorts of crimes. Especially when there is no real interest in truth or justice, but only a focus on partisan advantage. I think that Hillary has a lot of enemies, and some of them are vicious to the point of insanity. Now imagine that you had an insanely vicious enemy and that enemy had complete access to all of your email. "Guilty, guilty, guilty! Off with her head!"
However, in bowing to the tone of today's slashdot, let me close on the lightheaded level. It might become a national problem if a con man occupies the oval office and there's no such thing as witches.
There seems to be a lot of emotional attachment to the google here, and some people seem to have taken umbrage at the Subject: line as the google's new motto, so let me point you at a different example that might scare a little sense into you.
Ever heard of Personality Insights (PI)? Here is the live demo link:
Click on the "Body of Text" tab and then the "Your own text" button. (At that point you'll even have four languages to play with.)
I suggest you paste in a large chunk of stuff that you've written and see what the analysis looks like. The graphical representation is especially interesting. Then consider if you would like that analysis to be available to your enemies (and friends)--but if the "large chunk of stuff" is public, then it already is.
Returning to the google, I'm not certain, but I believe that the evidence suggests that the google personality profile of each user is WAY beyond PI. (I actually interpret PI in terms of the strange loops of Hofstadter's recent book, but that's going a bit far afield, even for me.) If I revealed any of the countermeasures, then the google might not like me, eh?
Mostly going to focus on a short answer to your closing question. The google is motivated to increase their abuse of your personal information because they have a problem. They need more profit. This is not a real problem or a solvable problem. NO amount of profit would be sufficient to solve the problem of needing more money.
Perhaps you have some emotional relationship with the google, so I'm going to switch to Amazon as an example. You might like their recommendations even though they are using your personal information to manipulate you into buying more things. However, let's consider the limiting case. Assume that Amazon has succeeded in capturing ALL of your shopping. Would they be satisfied? No, they would simply be motivated to figure out new ways to get you to buy goods with higher profit margins for Amazon.
Short capsule summary on the broader issue: People usually worry about abuse of privacy in terms of the stick of negative information. It is pretty obvious that blackmail is bad. However, my focus on freedom leads me to the conclusion that the carrot side is much worse. I suggest you consider the definition of freedom in my sig... The google is perfectly positioned to attack "meaningful".
The following URL is for a post that includes some of the related nonfiction books I've read this year. My current queue includes one book about Amazon and another about Facebook.
I think some people may regard it as a browser problem because it depends on the control of the focus, and the browser is controlling whether the focus is in the input window or outside. However, I regard it as the responsibility of the website to consider the user's experience and prevent such problems.
What's slashdot's excuse? They can't find the right place in the spaghetti code?
Okay, with the polite encouragement and a bit of slack time this morning, I'll try to reconstruct the parts I can remember.
It focused on HP as a company that was a non-evil one, but many years ago. At that time, their corporate goals said very little about money or profits, but they admitted that they would be profitable if they did good work on the other goals. There was nothing about profit maximization, just that they wanted to do a bunch of good things. I would even say that HP might have been the best company in the world for a while, but it has completely changed now. This was so many years ago that I can't even remember the details of the downward transition, but I suspect that it might have been the time of Carly Fiorina. (Mostly I'm bemused that I clearly remember feeling great optimism when she became CEO.)
I can't remember the transition, but there was a section on higher levels of evil. In short, it is kind of bad to become evil because you are following rules that encourage short-term evil policies, but it is much worse to invest in making the rules worse. I cited Exxon as a company that has invested heavily in bribing politicians to write bad laws, and Enron as a short-lived example of extreme investment in politicians (including Dubya), and though Enron got their comeuppance when they imploded, even that was harmful to many relatively innocent people. (One of my friends had briefly been an internal auditor at Enron...) That section closed with the note that the google has become one of the top companies in funding lobbyists. (Not yet ready to say if google's lobbyists are making things worse or better.)
Again, I don't remember the transition, but I recommended competition with progressive taxation on profits related to excessive market dominance. That led into consideration of how to deal with natural monopolies. I strongly disagree that google or Microsoft or Amazon have or deserve natural monopolies.
Your response is probably sincere, but too incoherent to respond to in a reasonable amount of time. The main improvement you could make in your writing would be to clearly separate the parts you are quoting from your own text. My comments are sort of mashed into your reply in various places. However, I actually recommend against inline replies for several reasons (but I don't want to trigger a religious war about posting styles).
One point of confusion was clear enough to address, the ASI question. That refers to Artificial SuperIntelligence. The basic idea is that if we can build an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and many companies are known to be working on that problem, then there may be no barrier to extending the same technology to create a machine that is much smarter than we are. Our Final Invention is interesting as a recent nonfiction overview, but the theme has been discussed many times, especially in science fiction.
This is relevant to the google precisely because the google is doing their AGI work in secret. There are many companies that are working with various degrees of visibility, but google is especially notable for their secrecy. The book provides a lot of circumstantial evidence, especially in terms of staffing, but the google is clearly planning a surprise. Apparently we just have to hope they aren't more surprised than we are...
Okay, so you don't value your freedom and you are happy being manipulated. The carrot side usually tastes okay.
If freedom isn't important to you, then perhaps you should think a bit about the stick? Oh wait. Maybe you're perfect and you've never made any embarrassing little mistakes?
Just read an interesting book called Our Final Invention about the nastiest stick, ASI with no use for us. Don't get me wrong. If the google does it first, I'm going to surrender ASAP. No sense in fighting the inevitable. Maybe the ASI will feel like keeping a few of us around in some sort of zoo?
Pretty good question, and I spent several minutes writing you a nice response. Then slashdot destroyed it with the <Backspace> bug. Too tired to reconstruct it now, but it was mostly old stuff about companies that encourage competition and free choice versus monsters like Exxon, Enron, and today's google. I even included a bit about breaking natural monopolies, but... *sigh* Much of the answer is implicit in my sig.
Right now I mostly wish I could donate towards a feature-improvement project to fix that <Backspace> bug. Probably the cookie-based-draft implementation would be least expensive.
I think you are confusing aspirations with reality. Oracle has sunk so low that they are approaching "mostly harmless" status, whereas the google has completely transcended and redefined EVIL. New motto is "All your attention are belong to us". Your personal data is just collected for more leverage.
The real problem is that we are forced to pick between lesser evils in EVERY purchase we make. The single-objective quest for profit has produced a small number of cancerous monster companies. I'm wracking my brains, but right now I am unable to think of a single company that I've recently done business with that I would rate as more good than evil.
Mostly our own collective fault? I can actually think of a few companies that seem basically good, but the result is that their goods and services are no longer competitive, so I can't even justify the premium I'd have to pay. Of course, then I can rationalize the decisions to do business with the typical bad companies. The good company is probably going to go bad soon enough, or it's probably bad on the inside if I just look a bit more closely. The entire game of business (especially in America) has been rigged for nasty companies that grow like mindless cancers in pursuit of more money.
Unsolvable problem. NO amount of money would ever be "more" enough.
If that was a travesty of a Trump supporter, it certainly captured the incoherence.
If that was an actual Trump supporter, it certainly captured the incoherence.
I guess Hillary wins the last point by default, but as I said in the OP, I'm basically neutral towards her. However I'm beginning to like her for her excellent taste in enemies. I rather wish the American political system weren't so biased in favor of lawyers, but we could do much worse in the Donald's case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not all of them, but I'm sadly sure that some criminals will be willing to take advantage of the situation. Of course the most serious threat is that the extremely black-hat hackers will exploit the unlocked WiFi networks to pwn routers and linked computers for later abuse. In accord with Dan Ariely's research, the criminals will think they are being relatively nice guys by saving their major depredations until after the immediate emergency has been addressed.
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/f... is a quasi-review of one of his books about dishonesty, even including an honest email exchange...
However, I think it would be much better if we did it the other way around. Rather than maximizing the profits of the big Internet companies, we should always be configured to run as much of the infrastructure as possible on our own systems. In other words, WiFi routers would normally be configured for safe sharing, and handling emergencies would just be a natural extension of wireless communications that the big Internet companies are not controlling and profiting from.
Punchline is that profit is not the primary driver of the bad design. It's all about controlling our communications. I think the primary driver for centralized control of the Internet is the governments. They WANT the rules and laws to work that way. If things got out of control, if the peasants were actually in charge of the Internet, how would they control the peasants? Real democracy scares them more than anything.
Trying to decide whether or not to name names, but in a sense it doesn't matter. As near as I can tell, ALL companies hate old employees. Various companies have various reasons, but I think high-tech companies (like HP and my former employer) might be the most hateful.
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology. Even if the old folks are willing to work as cheaply as fresh hires, and even if the old folks are fast learners, salary cuts are intrinsically demotivating. You can try disguises like "declining health", but they don't work well and job satisfaction tends to decline. Anyway, the bean counters at the top prefer fresh meat. Cheap.
In Japan the situation is especially critical because the demographic transition is resulting in lots of old people and very few young ones. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has actually put out "guidelines" that strongly encourage companies to keep older employers who want to work until at least age 65, but the companies are just playing games with the rules.
Without naming names, I'm going to try to summarize "a friend's" experiences. For brevity, AF. The managers started pressuring AF to retire around 55, but AF declined. AF's job and working conditions were steadily made worse and then AF was shoved out the door ASAP, which was AF's 60th birthday. The MHLW had a response. Rough translation: "They aren't supposed to do that if AF wanted to keep working, but tough titties."
Anyway, I'm just an old philosopher, so I get to say "That's too bad" to AF. In philosophic terms, there are four quadrants to consider. Everyone wants to be in Q1 with good work and good compensation, and no one wants to be in Q4 with bad work and bad pay. The interesting cases are Q2, good work with bad pay, and Q3, bad work with good pay. AF wanted Q1 or Q2, but got shoved into Q3 and then Q4.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness. Insofar as most of my career was spent in Q1 and Q2, I can't complain too much. However, at this point it appears that my best outcome is to pass away before I exhaust my savings. I would contribute more to the economy if my new focus wasn't on minimizing my expenses, eh? You'd think the companies might be smart enough to worry about the loss of business from all of those penny-pinching retirees, but they obviously aren't that smart.
I really do have to feel sorry for people like you. Why are you so desperate to hate Hillary? Why are you twisting your entire mentality around justifying your numerous hatreds?
Thank gawd someone like you can't understand me. It makes me feel rather happy. Well, at least relieved.
Another one of those backward thinking results. People like you make Hillary look good and worth supporting. The extremists haters are quite probably the #2 reason that Hillary may win.
Of course the #1 reason is the Donald. It would be hilarious if they produced some examples of Trump's email to show him mixing his personal and business affairs. Then we could watch you Hillary haters going through fresh mental gymnastics explaining why it's completely different when Trump does it.
Hmm... But the problem is that the Constitution defines the presidential election process in a winner-take-all way. That means that attacking Hillary, even by merely accepting and propagating the slander against her, is increasing the likelihood of the other winner.
In a winner-take-all election system there are only two stable states: Two balanced teams (parties) compete for the bulk of the voters in the middle, or one team has a permanent dominance of the game. In a sense the openness of the system actually makes it worse, because whatever technique works for one side will tend to be adopted by the other, and principles and philosophies be darned. I suppose the sad joke is that the founders feared the idea of political parties precisely because they expected the parties to put their partisan interests ahead of the nation's concerns--and I think the results have shown their fears were extremely well considered and justified.
If they had been even more innovative than they were, then they might have come up with the coalition solution, but they had their limits and that idea didn't come up until later. Nor could they anticipate the appearance of computerized gerrymandering...
Okay, so now you are accusing your boss of being an inhuman monster and apparently trying to gain my sympathy for your sad work situation.
But mostly you're just proving my point that most of Hillary's enemies are nuts and will go to ANY length to attack her. I didn't like Hillary much, but I'm beginning to love her for her enemies. I have this visceral thing against liars, and her enemies are clearly the biggest liars in that valley.
After MILLIONS of dollars spent looking for smoke, her enemies have come up with nothing. Not for a lack of sincere effort and massive wastes of taxpayers' money. No, you can't prove a negative, but at some point the sane people are going to say there just isn't any fire there.
Let's start with the hypothesis that Hillary had committed some crime. Millions of dollars have been spent investigating EVERY aspect of her life seeking evidence to convict her, and yet she remains unconvicted. The investigations are driven by people who are highly motivated and extremely hostile. Sometimes even insanely hostile. And yet, no conviction after MANY years of effort.
No, you cannot prove a negative, but at some point you have to say that the preponderance of the evidence is that she's been been careful enough in following the actual laws. Lawyers tend to be like that, and I do think that her primary personal identity is probably "lawyer" or "corporate lawyer". I wish it was "philosopher" or even "statesman", but I'm not holding my breath, especially after Citizens United. (On the rapidly growing list of bad decisions from the Supreme Court, I think that one is already near the top.) I still don't like lawyers.
Now let's consider examples of Trump saying insane things. How do you feel about the idea that Mexico is sending rapists to America? Something is insane about that idea. Do you want more examples? (Oh, and by the way, quite a number of psychologists and psychiatrists have said that they think there might be something wrong with the Donald.) Maybe you're imagination is too limited, but I can certainly imagine Trump coming out against guns--but only AFTER he's in the White House. If he did it before the election, then that would convince me that either he is insane or his entire campaign has been a sham.
I can't figure out which of my points you are trying to prove. Hillary haters are insane haters? Trump supporters are insane haters? Or perhaps the confusion is because you are both?
Or perhaps it was just a joke? However I also think that "Nuclear Pacification" isn't funny.
And you have never had to send an email message to your boss so you could take care of your child? Either you are a lifeless and inhuman bastard or you are so desperate to attack Hillary that you lie and demean yourself. Possibly both, now that I think about it.
I rather wish I had complete access to all of your email. I bet you would not like that very much.
And there is NEVER any relationship between the two?
Let's pretend you have an actual life. Perhaps you have a spouse and a child? Have you ever sent an email message to your boss about needing to take a day off so you can be with your child?
If your answer is no, then I think you are an inhuman bastard.
If your answer is yes, then you were lying. Why are you so desperate to attack Hillary that you demean yourself?
I actually find the situation rather laughable. I don't like Hillary, but her most vocal enemies are so vile that I am actually beginning to like her quite a bit. That obviously does not seem to be their intention.
As regards the presidency, some people seem to think it's supposed to be some sort of gawd. NO human being is qualified for such a job. I think it was really a shame that Ford pardoned Nixon because the job of president has become insane and really needs to be dragged all the way down to earth and buried in mud for a while. Maybe that is Trump's real plan?
Sorry, completely unpersuasive response. Not one actual crime? Just your feeling that she is a secret enemy of the Constitution?
If you are so sincerely afraid of someone taking your guns away that it overwhelms all other factors, then there really isn't much to say to you. However, even if you do sincerely believe that such a thing is possible in America, then it seems obvious you should only be afraid of a madman trying it.
No, I'm not convinced that Trump is insane, but sometimes he definitely says things that are insane. However, I still think he might be faking them and just playing to his fans. If he is faking, then the main danger is he starts believing himself. If he actually is insane, then of course all bets are off.
Hillary has said plenty of things I don't agree with, even things I strongly disagree with, but I can't point at anything insane. Her critics, on the other hand...
Hmm... Okay, I'm pert' shure I should stop there, but I'm going to say something about the 2nd Amendment: President Lincoln already repealed it. Myself, I don't much care, and I served in the military and owned guns when I lived in Texas, but even in those days I knew that the 2nd Amendment had been effectively repealed by the Civil War. However, I still think it was primarily a war of the Northern bankers against the Southern debtors and slavery was largely an excuse (to claim the moral high ground) and partly a cause (due to the economic inefficiency of slave labor that caused the debt). I think the human and economic cost of the Civil War was certainly not justified by any need to protect the bankers from default. Those high costs were why the Southern states believed the North would be insane to interfere with slavery--as long as they had the armed militias of the 2nd Amendment, but the outcome of the Civil War did finally settle the slavery question that had bothered the nation since its founding. To add insult to injury, those same Northern bankers supported and profited from the war profiteers. Or maybe the main insult is that their descendents are now supporting the so-called Republican Party?
If you study the history of those years, the entire point of the 2nd Amendment was NOT the personal and individual right to arms, but the independence and sovereignty of the individual states to be enforced by the states' well-regulated militias. The Bill of Rights was only tacked onto the Constitution at the last minute to persuade the states to ratify it.
I wasn't talking to you, troll.
Why would I attempt to have a discussion with someone who can only quality under two possible cases: (1) No personal life. (2) A flamboyant liar.
Do you sincerely believe that the Trump is such a gawd? You are so eager to bow down in worship?
(No, I can't believe that, either. Must be nuts or paid to fake it.)
You seem like a rational sort of fellow, so I'm going to ask why you think Hillary is such a terrible person?
Can you provide some concrete evidence of a terrible crime she has committed?
One solid case would be enough to significantly influence my opinion of her. However, I have had no problem in finding many accusations, and all of them have turned out to be partisan or baseless or both. (Well, actually a few of them are accusations of the form of "She's not perfect", but no one is.)
Or are you just accepting the framing of a false narrative? Has Hillary stopped beating her husband yet?
Let me be clear that I do not love Hillary Clinton. Nor do I hate her. I do not like lawyers, but given that lawyers wrote the election laws, there's a bias there. I do not like dynasties, but (1) she's only a Clinton by marriage, (2) a founder is not yet a dynasty, and (3) she has accomplished enough on her own that she can legitimately claim to be her own woman.
She is not a witch. I don't think ANYONE is really qualified for the monstrosity that today's presidency has become, but I've convinced she's at least as qualified as any of the American presidents of my lifetime as of their election, and far more qualified than Dubya was.
(Not really relevant, but I think Trump is the least qualified candidate I've ever seen, with the possible exceptions of Dan Quayle (intellectually unfit) or the big dick Cheney (morally unfit).)
Do you completely separate your personal email from the work-related email? Have you ever mentioned work-related items in personal correspondence? Have you ever mentioned personal matters in work email?
You are living in a glass house, my friend. What's with all the stones?
https://slashdot.org/journal/2... (You (and I) are at least as "guilty" as Hillary).
On the Trump aspect, I'm not sure. The problem with trying to assess a con man and liar is that there is no evidence in his statements about what he actually believes. I am not convinced that Trump is "completely out of touch with reality". He might be lying about that, too, and merely exploiting the insanity of other people. Right now I'm inclined towards the theory that he does feed off the crowd, and he might even be something of a method actor, and while he's on stage he tries to convince himself of the reality of the role he is playing. If that theory is correct, then when Trump is on stage in front of a mob of angry racists, then he sincerely becomes a racist, but he might shake it off as soon as he returns to his dressing room. But shake it off completely? With no residual mental damage or side effects in the form of mental aberrations? That seems REALLY hard to believe, even compared to some of Trump's flaming lies.
There were only two comments moderated as "insightful", and neither of them deserved to be. Accepting the brokenness of the slashdot moderation system, I did some textual searches of the comments and also came up dry.
There are some deep issues here, and I think that there was a time when slashdot (in a collective sense) would have been capable of addressing some of them. "Trump is a con man" and "Hillary is a witch" are NOT deep issues.
I think there are two most important issues here. One is the partisan abuse of power. Using the FBI for partisan witch hunts is bad enough, but I think the focus of Congress on partisan scheming and advertising is much more serious. There are actual national problems that the Congress could be working on.
However, for now I'm primarily going to focus on the second issue, which I can summarize as "Nobody's perfect." If you (or I) were subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny that Hillary Clinton has received, that scrutiny would turn up plenty of "evidence" of all sorts of crimes. Especially when there is no real interest in truth or justice, but only a focus on partisan advantage. I think that Hillary has a lot of enemies, and some of them are vicious to the point of insanity. Now imagine that you had an insanely vicious enemy and that enemy had complete access to all of your email. "Guilty, guilty, guilty! Off with her head!"
However, in bowing to the tone of today's slashdot, let me close on the lightheaded level. It might become a national problem if a con man occupies the oval office and there's no such thing as witches.
There seems to be a lot of emotional attachment to the google here, and some people seem to have taken umbrage at the Subject: line as the google's new motto, so let me point you at a different example that might scare a little sense into you.
Ever heard of Personality Insights (PI)? Here is the live demo link:
https://personality-insights-l...
Click on the "Body of Text" tab and then the "Your own text" button. (At that point you'll even have four languages to play with.)
I suggest you paste in a large chunk of stuff that you've written and see what the analysis looks like. The graphical representation is especially interesting. Then consider if you would like that analysis to be available to your enemies (and friends)--but if the "large chunk of stuff" is public, then it already is.
Returning to the google, I'm not certain, but I believe that the evidence suggests that the google personality profile of each user is WAY beyond PI. (I actually interpret PI in terms of the strange loops of Hofstadter's recent book, but that's going a bit far afield, even for me.) If I revealed any of the countermeasures, then the google might not like me, eh?
Mostly going to focus on a short answer to your closing question. The google is motivated to increase their abuse of your personal information because they have a problem. They need more profit. This is not a real problem or a solvable problem. NO amount of profit would be sufficient to solve the problem of needing more money.
Perhaps you have some emotional relationship with the google, so I'm going to switch to Amazon as an example. You might like their recommendations even though they are using your personal information to manipulate you into buying more things. However, let's consider the limiting case. Assume that Amazon has succeeded in capturing ALL of your shopping. Would they be satisfied? No, they would simply be motivated to figure out new ways to get you to buy goods with higher profit margins for Amazon.
Short capsule summary on the broader issue: People usually worry about abuse of privacy in terms of the stick of negative information. It is pretty obvious that blackmail is bad. However, my focus on freedom leads me to the conclusion that the carrot side is much worse. I suggest you consider the definition of freedom in my sig... The google is perfectly positioned to attack "meaningful".
The following URL is for a post that includes some of the related nonfiction books I've read this year. My current queue includes one book about Amazon and another about Facebook.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Yeah, I should have mentioned that option.
I think some people may regard it as a browser problem because it depends on the control of the focus, and the browser is controlling whether the focus is in the input window or outside. However, I regard it as the responsibility of the website to consider the user's experience and prevent such problems.
What's slashdot's excuse? They can't find the right place in the spaghetti code?
Okay, with the polite encouragement and a bit of slack time this morning, I'll try to reconstruct the parts I can remember.
It focused on HP as a company that was a non-evil one, but many years ago. At that time, their corporate goals said very little about money or profits, but they admitted that they would be profitable if they did good work on the other goals. There was nothing about profit maximization, just that they wanted to do a bunch of good things. I would even say that HP might have been the best company in the world for a while, but it has completely changed now. This was so many years ago that I can't even remember the details of the downward transition, but I suspect that it might have been the time of Carly Fiorina. (Mostly I'm bemused that I clearly remember feeling great optimism when she became CEO.)
I can't remember the transition, but there was a section on higher levels of evil. In short, it is kind of bad to become evil because you are following rules that encourage short-term evil policies, but it is much worse to invest in making the rules worse. I cited Exxon as a company that has invested heavily in bribing politicians to write bad laws, and Enron as a short-lived example of extreme investment in politicians (including Dubya), and though Enron got their comeuppance when they imploded, even that was harmful to many relatively innocent people. (One of my friends had briefly been an internal auditor at Enron...) That section closed with the note that the google has become one of the top companies in funding lobbyists. (Not yet ready to say if google's lobbyists are making things worse or better.)
Again, I don't remember the transition, but I recommended competition with progressive taxation on profits related to excessive market dominance. That led into consideration of how to deal with natural monopolies. I strongly disagree that google or Microsoft or Amazon have or deserve natural monopolies.
Your response is probably sincere, but too incoherent to respond to in a reasonable amount of time. The main improvement you could make in your writing would be to clearly separate the parts you are quoting from your own text. My comments are sort of mashed into your reply in various places. However, I actually recommend against inline replies for several reasons (but I don't want to trigger a religious war about posting styles).
One point of confusion was clear enough to address, the ASI question. That refers to Artificial SuperIntelligence. The basic idea is that if we can build an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and many companies are known to be working on that problem, then there may be no barrier to extending the same technology to create a machine that is much smarter than we are. Our Final Invention is interesting as a recent nonfiction overview, but the theme has been discussed many times, especially in science fiction.
This is relevant to the google precisely because the google is doing their AGI work in secret. There are many companies that are working with various degrees of visibility, but google is especially notable for their secrecy. The book provides a lot of circumstantial evidence, especially in terms of staffing, but the google is clearly planning a surprise. Apparently we just have to hope they aren't more surprised than we are...
Okay, so you don't value your freedom and you are happy being manipulated. The carrot side usually tastes okay.
If freedom isn't important to you, then perhaps you should think a bit about the stick? Oh wait. Maybe you're perfect and you've never made any embarrassing little mistakes?
Just read an interesting book called Our Final Invention about the nastiest stick, ASI with no use for us. Don't get me wrong. If the google does it first, I'm going to surrender ASAP. No sense in fighting the inevitable. Maybe the ASI will feel like keeping a few of us around in some sort of zoo?
Pretty good question, and I spent several minutes writing you a nice response. Then slashdot destroyed it with the <Backspace> bug. Too tired to reconstruct it now, but it was mostly old stuff about companies that encourage competition and free choice versus monsters like Exxon, Enron, and today's google. I even included a bit about breaking natural monopolies, but... *sigh* Much of the answer is implicit in my sig.
Right now I mostly wish I could donate towards a feature-improvement project to fix that <Backspace> bug. Probably the cookie-based-draft implementation would be least expensive.
I think you are confusing aspirations with reality. Oracle has sunk so low that they are approaching "mostly harmless" status, whereas the google has completely transcended and redefined EVIL. New motto is "All your attention are belong to us". Your personal data is just collected for more leverage.
The real problem is that we are forced to pick between lesser evils in EVERY purchase we make. The single-objective quest for profit has produced a small number of cancerous monster companies. I'm wracking my brains, but right now I am unable to think of a single company that I've recently done business with that I would rate as more good than evil.
Mostly our own collective fault? I can actually think of a few companies that seem basically good, but the result is that their goods and services are no longer competitive, so I can't even justify the premium I'd have to pay. Of course, then I can rationalize the decisions to do business with the typical bad companies. The good company is probably going to go bad soon enough, or it's probably bad on the inside if I just look a bit more closely. The entire game of business (especially in America) has been rigged for nasty companies that grow like mindless cancers in pursuit of more money.
Unsolvable problem. NO amount of money would ever be "more" enough.
Z^14
If that was a travesty of a Trump supporter, it certainly captured the incoherence.
If that was an actual Trump supporter, it certainly captured the incoherence.
I guess Hillary wins the last point by default, but as I said in the OP, I'm basically neutral towards her. However I'm beginning to like her for her excellent taste in enemies. I rather wish the American political system weren't so biased in favor of lawyers, but we could do much worse in the Donald's case.