In order to know the current weather, one could look out the window. Or worse: Actually walk outside and have a feel.
Granted, where I live "buienradar" is a good thing since it allows you to plan around rainfall at a given location at a given time, but this smartwatch bug seems to be a first world problem if ever I saw one.
Which is why governments can step in with subsidies, minimum and maximum price levels, tariffs and other protectionist measures.
There is no such thing as a free market, by the way. Theoretically such a thing contains an infinite number of sellers, an infinite number of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. So don't come and tell me you believe in letting the market decide when, for instance, you dislike the notion of child labour or slavery: The minute you decide to impart any kind of moral or regulation on a trade, the market is not free. The minute you have a skewed market (towards monopsony or monopoly), it's not free.
So regulating things or making decisions about how a society should function and distribute it's wealth, freedom and safety is not exactly a gateway drug to balls to the wall Stalinism. I'm just putting it out there for all US citizens on this thread.
Freedom of expression trumping the right to live... What poppycock.
In most countries the freedom of expression is limited not only to avoid threats, but also to avoid slander, incitement to hate, false marketing, insults and in some nations blasphemy. With the exception of the latter, all of these are good and fair limitations. Even in the US.
In my country, it's also illegal to express yourself above a given volume from ten in the evening tillseven thirty in the morning.
There are preciously few area's in life that would benefit from absolute freedom. Certainly not as long as we are what we are, and seven billion of us to boot.
There are whole swaths of research that suggest teams that are comprised of a healthy mix of males and females are actually more performant than their less diverse counterparts. Therefore, it would be in the interest of economic and societal stability to not let the nation's jewels be guarded by an incestuous gentleman's club.
Speaking of which, I still don't understand society's fascination with "economic growth". I for one would strive for a comfortable equilibrium instead. But that's just me. It seems I have a fetish for balance above all.
You should flip the order of your concerns. The tax one is the most important one.
Lower taxes for the wealthy and for corporations means the lower and middle classes are either squeezed for more money or will receive fewer benefits and shittier service, and thus have a crap life while.05% of society walks off scot free with the nation's collective resources.
This will breed poverty and discontent, which in turn might breed violence and instability, especially give the rather onerous decision to let all manner of weaponry float about in society.
My good man! I'm not sure you have bothered to ever understand Nazi ideology. Do read up on them a bit, if you get the chance.
To me it seems that state sanctioned civil violence is a jolly bad idea. It's uncivilized, it makes your country less safe (judging by the murder rate) and what's worse, this whole poppycock about owning guns (which you shouldn't) distracts from more pertinent political debates such as poverty, income and capital inequality, employment and education for all and lastly the deplorable state of health of quite a few Americans. That last bit is one of mine... The girth of many Americans is becoming quite unacceptable, you see, and they are very poorly insured.
Socialism is just a way of looking at economic re-distribution, it does not equate a violent racist regime. I for one am a socialist. This means I am constitutionally conservative (I wish to conserve Dutch constitutional values, not the shoddy American one with the guns and distrust), progressive by nature, non-violent, in favour of greater socio-economic equality and against too much free market kool-aid. No more, no less.
Being a socialist does not mean I want to invade Poland or kill homosexuals, you see. But do carry on trying to add to this rather lively and colourful debate.
On the night of the election I actually spoke to a colleague of mine in Vegas. She appears to be a technician, republican, lesbian-in-wait-to-be-married (but can't, because it's illegal), Texan, Gun Lover and Pro-lifer.
When I asked her why she'd vote for a party that would stop her from marrying her love, she mumbled something about guns and freedom. Then when I asked her how she reconciles the notion of being a Gun Lover while proclaiming to be "pro-life" she basically told me to bugger off.
These people really don't like it when you start rubbing their cognitive dissonance too much.
The Democrats are oddly the American party that thinks state intervention in things like healthcare and social benefits are good, so one should logically expect Democrats to not mind a bit more state surveillance either.
But then I've always thought it funny that it's precisely the Republicans who tend to cry "no government is good government" while simultaneously voting for significant government interference: - The State should stop abortion, which is a private matter - The State should stop gay marriages, another private matter - The State should increase their police, surveillance and armed force apparatus - The State should willy-nilly be able to collect large amounts of data on its citizenry
None of the above is really a move towards more "freedom" and "autonomy" for the citizens, although they do call anyone opposed to these ideas a socialist. As if that would be an insult.
I truly don't logically understand American politics, the US or its citizens very well. Having just returned from an involuntary week in Las Vegas I can only say I am happy to not be living there if only because the coffee sucks and portions are jolly well uncivilized.
Well... If you say a couple of evangelical DJ's caused the genocide in Rwanda, you are casually sidestepping 200 years of colonialist politics on the African continent where western powers (In the case of Rwanda Germany and mostly Belgium) defined borders that went straight across areas regardless of culture, tribal status or inhabitants. What's worse, the propensity of the Belgian colonialists to incite the population divide by elevating one of the present tribes to a position of privilege so as to secure their own footing in said colony didn't exactly stabilize the region either.
But hey, I do doubt said evangelical DJ's helped matters much, I'll give you that.
I wonder why such a misinformed and misleading post is deemed insightful by forum members.
Firstly, in most European countries, the right to free speech is not actually legally or even constitutionally enshrined. There is the usual right to assembly, free thought and a freedom to adhere to any creed one wishes, but in most European countries Slander, Inciting to Hate or public unrest and Defamation are all illegal under criminal law, mind you. Therefore, as a default, there are legal limitations to how free speech actually is. And this is a good thing.
When the "free speech" mob starts trotting out "censorship" as a mule to flog, I get a little tired. In a world that contains 7 billion people of all colours, creeds, genders, races and beliefs, one should not strive for completely unmoderated speech. Because there are too many narrow minded morons in this world, it would descend into chaos and anger. As my grandfather wisely used to quip: You can think what you like, but you can't say whatever you think.
That out of the way, the legal definition of hate speech is quite well defined in a number of European countries as well, and prosecutions can actually be realised. Specifically the Germans have *ahem* learned a couple of painful lessons from their own history, although it must be said that Europe between 1860 and 1940 had large institutionalised racist agendas with the so-called "Race-biological Institutions" in various countries, so by no means do I want to single out the Germans as the only purveyors of a certain breed of thinking. So while this is not a reductio ad Hitlerium argument, one must be vigilant of the possible consequences of unchecked hate speech, "Volksverhetzung", "Aanzetten tot haat", "Agitation publique" or whatever you wish to call it.
As for those who actually use social media to spread poppycock, hate-speech, racism, bile, xenophobia and religious fervour alike, I for one do think it would be great if these people be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The law is there to be enforced, whether you intend to kill, steal, embezzle, con or incite to hatred. But the lack of editorial decisions from Facebook's side is something they should indeed be held accountable for. Facebook serves as a news outlet to some 38% of the American public. I shudder to think about that, given the amount of moronic vitriol and cat video's that permeate that network. The likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter wield quite a bit of power, and their corporate nature drives them to shun any form of responsibility.
From my perspective, it is heartwarming to see a nation state such as Germany finally spring into action to protect the education, sovereignty, privacy and safety of its citizens by holding these media corporations (which they are by now) accountable for the information they provide to said citizenry.
Terrorism is a statistically completely irrelevant cause of death. 2014 was the most peaceful year in human history. Recently, only 0.9% of all deaths are violence related and there are indications this is on the decline. Life Expectancy is rising, Child Mortality is dropping and life seems to be moving on. Apart from Cancer, Heart, Lungs and stuff like Malaria, traffic is a big one we should be worried about, really. Having a staircase in one's house is, for instance, more dangerous than the notion of terrorism ever will be.
Now, here come the news outlets. Apart from all this "Educating and Informing The People", "Freedom of Speecht" and "Checks and Balances" bullshit, the press and media generally exist to make money. In some cases they even seem to exist for more Machiavellian purposes, but to make money is a biggie. So when something as statistically insignificant as a terror attack happens *Close By*, the news explodes. It's like a gigantic circle jerk in which everyone and their uncle needs to fill yards and yards of column space or air time to talk about What May Have Happened, Why It May Have Happened or What May Happen Next and Which Refugees To Treat Like Shit Because Of This.
So generally speaking, the Media seem to take events like this and add to the sense of fear that terrorists would have instilled in the citizenry. As such, I'm beginning to view the media as culpable in the problem of terrorism, because any wacko can get a world wide platform by misbehaving in an instant. Social media are even worse when it comes to knee jerk bullshit and mass panic.
Which leads me to Slashdot. I think Slashdot is a haven of alternative news which offers refreshing takes on things, interesting articles, sometimes brilliant and inspired discussions. It is a news aggregator / outlet that works differently, feels differently and makes me feel at home in more than a few ways.
I am sad to see that even here, there needs to be a discussion on Paris. I came here to avoid that news. Moreover, I came here to avoid certain discussions about Guns, Islam, The Administration and Refugees. Because these discussions are boringly predictable, polarised, fraught with no-fact-debates and generally just plain stupid.
Well, mate, if you'd then bother to learn someone else's language for a change, you could enjoy the Dutch NPO, the French France Televisions SA, the German ARD, Sveriges Television and many other public broadcasters.
Now I would not mind at all if you watched programmes on the Dutch NPO which I payed for with my NL TV License fees. It's just that you can't. Because you're uni-lingual. The fact that the average German, French, Dutchman and Scandinavian can watch your shows because we hablo Ingles and possibly few other languages doesn't change that fact.
So instead of bickering about me enjoying the odd re-run of Allo Allo and nature shows narrated by Sir Attenborough, I suggest you go back to school.
Now you might say that I respond harshly to your comments, but please remember that the people in the smaller countries and smaller language zones bend over backwards to accommodate the English speaking world. One fringe benefit of me watching your BBC would be that you can actually get a fish and chips in Amsterdam, and we'll happily converse with you about the weather in Wales while we serve it to you from the English menu you just read.
So is it worth your TV license fee to not have to feel like a hapless idiot when you travel the mainland?
You manage to misrepresent transgenderism in one fell and foul swoop there.
Gender, in terms of how the brain is wired, is actually wired into the system before the testes drop or not. To cut a very long and technical story short, you are mentally wired to be male or female regardless of how your body turns out. For a small percentage of society, this means that their brains don't match their physical attributes, and the consequence of this is indeed a life long quest to become "right".
Stigmas and taboos are quite counterproductive for these individuals, and what Russia is doing is a gross violation of human rights. Then again, I don't expect much sympathy from US citizens, because the LGBT community is still under siege in the US as well. Laws are discriminatory, and public discourse is not very accepting of these folks. All you need to do is watch some Fox News and you'll get the gist.
Characterising the transgendered plight as "dress up in women's lingerie" only serves to exacerbate this situation, even if the intentions are quite OK.
"Capitalism" is really quite a useless term. It frames the discussion in terms of a dichotomy that does not exist in reality. The Americans have now even started equating Socialism with Communism and by proxy of that full fledged Marxism, and then turn around to oppose this with "Freedom" or a "Free Market".
Now I have said this in another post, but there is no such thing as a free market. A free market has an unlimited amount of sellers, an unlimited amount of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. As soon as there's a discrepancy between the supply and demand side, like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies the market isn't truly "free".
Then as soon as you regulate the market in any way, shape or form it isn't truly free. Now for those libertarians out there, or those "no-government is good government" folks on this forum: "Capitalism" as translated into free market doctrine really sucks at morality. Do you agree that child labour ought to be illegal? Are you against slavery? Do you think some oversight should exist as to the circumstances under which labour is performed? If you answer yes to any of those questions, you yourself do not believe in a "free" market.
This means we can quit demonizing "Socialists" because of their alleged "anti-freedom" stance, and we can get on with having some constructive discussions on how we want to redistribute assets so as to maximize the welfare of the world population as a whole. Preferably based on fact rather than faintly religious notions.
Now the notions of a "free market", the "trickle-down effect" and most importantly the "rational actor model" that have been put forth by the Chicago school of economics and their ilk have been proven to be wrong and ineffective countless times. It should become clear if you look at the state of the US today, actually. For reference I would point towards the collected works of Joseph Stiglitz and Ha-Joon Chang.
Yet the public at large seems to want to keep paying lip service to these faulty theories and continues politicians, bankers and businessmen to act in accordance to that which is known to fuck up.
If you are saying people act according to "mutual benefit" you are a proponent of the "rational actor model" I talked about earlier, and that notion is bunk. This is not only made clear by Kahneman et al, but if you delve into George Lakoff's work you'll see that even our definition of rational thought is somewhat fictionalized. Dan Gardner will allow you to see how there is nothing rational about our calculation of risk and Barry Schwartz and Dan Azriely have written volumes on how we are impacted by choices.
To cut a long story short: Cognitive science has long proven that we wouldn't know what "mutual benefit" really is if it kicked us in the ass, which is illustrated by the ever narrowing of the definition of "rationality" in the rational actor model. So yes, the invisible hand as you define it is fictitious at best and completely religious at its worst.
We need government and we need to make some moral decisions as to the kind of society we wish to live in, and enforce that notion through the rule of law, also where economic policy and redistribution of wealth are concerned.
But then religion has already lost all meaning. It just doesn't realize it yet.
I understand the need for some notion of spirituality because people can be freaked out by the prospect of a finite and largely meaningless life, so in order not to go insane I guess some of us need imaginary friends and a promise of an afterlife.
However, in daily life neither my religious neighbors nor I do not ask god to charge our mobile phones. We use a charger that was built and engineered by mankind. Similarly, I don't need a god for morality either. Simple empathy will enable us to do the right thing. We can recognize suffering and decide to try and end or minimize it all by ourselves.
I'd even go as far as to say that a morality that hinges on an external factor dictating it is weaker than a fully internalized and autonomous morality.
Given that opening statement, there is no practical and discernible difference between a religion, dogma and ideology.
It is easy to look at Islam and consider it to be the root of all evil. Quite frankly this strikes me as a clean cut case of confusing correlation with causality.
Let me start by saying I do not condone violence of any kind, whether it's sectarian for any religion we know of or just plain assholery. So I don't condone the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Gaza or the invasion of Charlie Hebdo's premise in any way, shape or form. Too many innocent and civilian lives are squandered tragically by all of these actions. Whether it's Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the IRA, ETA, IDF or Rote Armee Fraktion, US Army or Halliburton that's engaging in violence, I don't care. It's all the same barbarism to me when civilians die.
However, I do find myself at odds with the notion of freedom of speech. I'll illustrate by means of a small segway:
Ha-Joon Chang, the Korean economist has once stated that there is no such thing as a free market. A free market has an unlimited amount of sellers, an unlimited amount of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. As soon as there's a discrepancy between the supply and demand side, like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies the market isn't truly "free".
Then as soon as you regulate the market it isn't truly free. Now for those libertarians out there, or those "no-government is good government" folks on this forum: "Capitalism" as translated into free market doctrine really sucks at morality. Do you agree that child labour ought to be illegal? Are you against slavery? Do you think some oversight should exist as to the circumstances under which labour is performed? If you answer yes to any of those questions, you yourself do not believe in a "free" market.
Similarly, my Constitution's Article 7 is colloquially called the Free Speech article, but really what it states is that Censorship is illegal as long as what you are saying, writing or broadcasting DOES NOT BREAK THE LAW. So the law says that hate-speech, slander and lastly "mis-representation of facts for commercial purposes" are all illegal.
As such, you are totally free to think what you like, but you can't say what you like. By that token: Nobody batted an eye when the Dutch courts forbade an organisation that openly advocated pedophilia. In this case, the consensus is that "free speech" should not be so free, think of the children, etc. But as soon as we are looking at insulting religion, speech should be "free".
Now if we look at the colonialist forces that shaped much of the Muslim world, all the way from Afghanistan to Syria, from Baghdad to Algiers, we should also get a notion of the socio-economic circumstances that arose after our collective (French, English, American and to a degree Belgian) intervention in those areas. And we can then safely conclude that those circumstances are highly conducive for violent crime: There is poverty, no rule of law, borders are haphazardly drawn across cultural and religious boundaries, and 19-35 year old males regularly have no prospect of procreating.
Then quite a few people fled these colonial FUBARs, and settled in Europe. This is about 4.5% of Europe's population, and they have been marginalized, discriminated and even treated with violence. If you look at the amount of violent attacks on mosques in the last 12 years, the list is staggeringly large as compared to attacks on synagogues or papers such as Charlie Hebdo.
So we are dealing with an impoverished population that has residual colonial trauma and is constantly being attacked from all angles, and then we wonder why violent excess enters the picture.
This is a very long winded way of saying that as far as taking the piss at Muslims is concerned, White Privilege becomes part of the equation. We can mock the RC Church more freely, because we are the elite and it is an institute of our own making. However, when we mock Islam we need to be mindful of the socio-economic and power structure we created in which these people survive.
It's akin to the difference between a black US citizen dropping the N-word vis a vis a white middle class male dropping the N-word. We need to be more cautious about viewing the whole picture if we are to solve radicalism in our societies.
And boy let me tell you, the items that are controversial in the USofA are not the same ones that are controversial over here in Europe. Of course we get a smattering of IS and Ebola related news this time of year, but in general political discourse tends to not involve discussions on what one should be doing with one's penis, vagina, uterus or the contents thereof, but much more about the re-distribution of wealth and the state of law.
I see that both in Israel and the US, to be honest: A focus on the irrelevant. Case in point being that the security craze and hype surrounding 9/11 has caused a spike in ground traffic that killed more people than the 9/11 incident itself. It seems to me that both the US and Israel have a greater tendency than normal to hype relatively small risk factors and completely and blatantly ignore evidence for large looming risk factors, even in the face of mounting evidence.
The more progressive a society gets, the more balanced people's view is on risk. Whether the one causes the other or vice versa, I do not know. The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland are decidedly more earthy in their political discourse, even if obviously we do have some fear mongering rotten apples. Case in point in the Netherlands being the fascist reactionaries that crawled from under all the rocks in the country in the wake of the discussion on whether blackface is a good idea, but I digress.
So while the findings are interesting, firstly 83 subjects is a piss in the pond and secondly the original poster is right: Is this finding universal for all the cultures we find on the globe?
Lastly, by US standards I would be a flaming liberal. There's nothing wrong with smoking a doozie, I am atheist, I think abortion isn't even worth a discussion since babies only really become sentient some 2 months after birth, obviously I am in favour of gay marriage and last but not least I think the proliferation of weapons amongst civilians (and even the army, but I digress again) is a really really silly idea.
However, I self identify as a Left Winger in terms of economic re-distribution politics, as a Constitutional Conservative when it comes to safeguarding the state of law in my country, a Conservationist in terms of the environment and indeed finally as a Liberal in terms of sexual practice and tolerance and the tolerance for people of other color. But when it comes to my atheism I am quite extremist. I think people who are god-believers are simply lesser beings and I do strive to stamp out god-belief and related silliness wherever I encounter it.
Now I wonder, given all my views and thoughts on things, whether I would be deemed a "Conservative" or "Liberal", and what selection criteria would be used for classifying me such. Because none of those were mentioned in the article.
You, as an individual, are not statistically relevant, even if what you describe is the actual truth. I say that last bit because infants, as soon as they are born, start sucking up language from their parents / caretakers, and I cannot really imagine you growing up in a total vacuum.
I do tend to agree most people learn best from people, because of the simple reason that there is so much evidence all around us that supports that claim. It is wired into us to mimic and learn from the people in our environment.
Information security and adhering to all manner of certification, both in terms of physical security and compliance to information management regulation, is usually a lot more stringent in a decent (professional) cloud environment than in people's own data center.
I'd be inclined to disagree with your assessment of hosted infrastructure, although quite honestly I am apprehensive about going to the cloud myself.
Yes they are. I work in the Information Management software division as a pre-sales, and I'm pretty much paid to tell subsets of the above to customers.
- We are our own reference customer for Connected backup for end-points. - We are our own reference customer for TRIM, now known as HP Records Manager 8.0 - We are our own reference customer for Database Archiving, now known as HP Application Information Optimiser
So all of that is publicly available in white-papers and case-studies.
The fact that we're building a public cloud infrastructure per country in Europe is also very much not a secret. If we want to get or retain EU based cloud customers, we need to be able to guarantee that their data remains their data and that it won't fall prey to third parties, chiefly amongst which the US government.
In terms of data center consolidation and cost savings associated with that, the strategy internal IT is following is largely in line with the Data Center concept we sell as Converged Infrastructure, Cloud System Matrix and Cloud System One.
Moreover our external web presence is run on the newly launched project Moonshot, in which you can currently cram some 45 servers in 5U rack space, which will soon get uplifted to 180 servers in 5U rack space.
All of this is a clean cut case of eating your own cooking, and then using that fact to market the underlying technologies.
So yes, I am very much convinced HP is comfortable with me sharing this publicly.
We've consolidate all office application servers to 5 data centers, one per continent. Then we've rolled out end-point backup for some 80.000 laptops in the field and some 150.000 more PC's around offices across the world which includes legal hold capabilities. Each country in which we're active has a number of mobile device options for telephony, most of them being Android and Win8 based nowadays since WebOS got killed.
Then we're in the process of building a European infrastructure where we have data centers for managed customer environments in every major market in Europe. I am currently not aware of what's going on in APJ or South America. This is important in Europe however, because managed European customers don't want to see their data end up in the States, and the same goes for those that use our cloud offerings.
physical local IT staff presence in all countries has been minimized to a skeleton crew, not only because of data center consolidation but also because of the formation of a global IT helpdesk in low cost countries, and the rise of self-service portals.
The plethora of databases we had internally has been Archived using Application Information Optimizer for structured data archiving. We are our own biggest reference customer in this regard. On top of that we've beefed up our VPN access portals across the world so as to accommodate road warriors logging in from diverse locations.
Lastly, we use our own Records Management software suite to generate 8.000.000. unique records per day. These are archived for a particular retention period (7 years I believe) for auditing purposes.
You are so right. "Ruminations" can be interesting, but for video presentations I vastly prefer TED talks. They have it nailed down 9 out of 10 times. This video presentation is boring beyond belief, which is a shame because the topic in and of itself is interesting.
Then what this guy is saying is directly opposed to what Tesla is saying on combustion engines. Also he doesn't seem to have a good grasp of what a cab company does. I don't know about the US, but taxi's here are used to transport the elderly to hospitals and doctors for check-ups and whatnot, and also to allow for mobility of elderly. This includes longer trips on the municipality's dime. As such "only one station" to fuel up taxi's is absolute poppycock.
Cut a long story short, I don't think Peter Wayner sounds like he can predict shit from shinola.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to know the current weather, one could look out the window. Or worse: Actually walk outside and have a feel.
Granted, where I live "buienradar" is a good thing since it allows you to plan around rainfall at a given location at a given time, but this smartwatch bug seems to be a first world problem if ever I saw one.
Which is why governments can step in with subsidies, minimum and maximum price levels, tariffs and other protectionist measures.
There is no such thing as a free market, by the way. Theoretically such a thing contains an infinite number of sellers, an infinite number of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. So don't come and tell me you believe in letting the market decide when, for instance, you dislike the notion of child labour or slavery: The minute you decide to impart any kind of moral or regulation on a trade, the market is not free. The minute you have a skewed market (towards monopsony or monopoly), it's not free.
So regulating things or making decisions about how a society should function and distribute it's wealth, freedom and safety is not exactly a gateway drug to balls to the wall Stalinism. I'm just putting it out there for all US citizens on this thread.
Freedom of expression trumping the right to live... What poppycock.
In most countries the freedom of expression is limited not only to avoid threats, but also to avoid slander, incitement to hate, false marketing, insults and in some nations blasphemy. With the exception of the latter, all of these are good and fair limitations. Even in the US.
In my country, it's also illegal to express yourself above a given volume from ten in the evening tillseven thirty in the morning.
There are preciously few area's in life that would benefit from absolute freedom. Certainly not as long as we are what we are, and seven billion of us to boot.
There are whole swaths of research that suggest teams that are comprised of a healthy mix of males and females are actually more performant than their less diverse counterparts. Therefore, it would be in the interest of economic and societal stability to not let the nation's jewels be guarded by an incestuous gentleman's club.
Speaking of which, I still don't understand society's fascination with "economic growth". I for one would strive for a comfortable equilibrium instead. But that's just me. It seems I have a fetish for balance above all.
You should flip the order of your concerns. The tax one is the most important one.
Lower taxes for the wealthy and for corporations means the lower and middle classes are either squeezed for more money or will receive fewer benefits and shittier service, and thus have a crap life while .05% of society walks off scot free with the nation's collective resources.
This will breed poverty and discontent, which in turn might breed violence and instability, especially give the rather onerous decision to let all manner of weaponry float about in society.
My good man! I'm not sure you have bothered to ever understand Nazi ideology. Do read up on them a bit, if you get the chance.
To me it seems that state sanctioned civil violence is a jolly bad idea. It's uncivilized, it makes your country less safe (judging by the murder rate) and what's worse, this whole poppycock about owning guns (which you shouldn't) distracts from more pertinent political debates such as poverty, income and capital inequality, employment and education for all and lastly the deplorable state of health of quite a few Americans. That last bit is one of mine... The girth of many Americans is becoming quite unacceptable, you see, and they are very poorly insured.
Socialism is just a way of looking at economic re-distribution, it does not equate a violent racist regime. I for one am a socialist. This means I am constitutionally conservative (I wish to conserve Dutch constitutional values, not the shoddy American one with the guns and distrust), progressive by nature, non-violent, in favour of greater socio-economic equality and against too much free market kool-aid. No more, no less.
Being a socialist does not mean I want to invade Poland or kill homosexuals, you see. But do carry on trying to add to this rather lively and colourful debate.
True that, amazingly.
On the night of the election I actually spoke to a colleague of mine in Vegas. She appears to be a technician, republican, lesbian-in-wait-to-be-married (but can't, because it's illegal), Texan, Gun Lover and Pro-lifer.
When I asked her why she'd vote for a party that would stop her from marrying her love, she mumbled something about guns and freedom. Then when I asked her how she reconciles the notion of being a Gun Lover while proclaiming to be "pro-life" she basically told me to bugger off.
These people really don't like it when you start rubbing their cognitive dissonance too much.
The Democrats are oddly the American party that thinks state intervention in things like healthcare and social benefits are good, so one should logically expect Democrats to not mind a bit more state surveillance either.
But then I've always thought it funny that it's precisely the Republicans who tend to cry "no government is good government" while simultaneously voting for significant government interference:
- The State should stop abortion, which is a private matter
- The State should stop gay marriages, another private matter
- The State should increase their police, surveillance and armed force apparatus
- The State should willy-nilly be able to collect large amounts of data on its citizenry
None of the above is really a move towards more "freedom" and "autonomy" for the citizens, although they do call anyone opposed to these ideas a socialist. As if that would be an insult.
I truly don't logically understand American politics, the US or its citizens very well. Having just returned from an involuntary week in Las Vegas I can only say I am happy to not be living there if only because the coffee sucks and portions are jolly well uncivilized.
Well... If you say a couple of evangelical DJ's caused the genocide in Rwanda, you are casually sidestepping 200 years of colonialist politics on the African continent where western powers (In the case of Rwanda Germany and mostly Belgium) defined borders that went straight across areas regardless of culture, tribal status or inhabitants. What's worse, the propensity of the Belgian colonialists to incite the population divide by elevating one of the present tribes to a position of privilege so as to secure their own footing in said colony didn't exactly stabilize the region either.
But hey, I do doubt said evangelical DJ's helped matters much, I'll give you that.
I wonder why such a misinformed and misleading post is deemed insightful by forum members.
Firstly, in most European countries, the right to free speech is not actually legally or even constitutionally enshrined. There is the usual right to assembly, free thought and a freedom to adhere to any creed one wishes, but in most European countries Slander, Inciting to Hate or public unrest and Defamation are all illegal under criminal law, mind you. Therefore, as a default, there are legal limitations to how free speech actually is. And this is a good thing.
When the "free speech" mob starts trotting out "censorship" as a mule to flog, I get a little tired. In a world that contains 7 billion people of all colours, creeds, genders, races and beliefs, one should not strive for completely unmoderated speech. Because there are too many narrow minded morons in this world, it would descend into chaos and anger. As my grandfather wisely used to quip: You can think what you like, but you can't say whatever you think.
That out of the way, the legal definition of hate speech is quite well defined in a number of European countries as well, and prosecutions can actually be realised. Specifically the Germans have *ahem* learned a couple of painful lessons from their own history, although it must be said that Europe between 1860 and 1940 had large institutionalised racist agendas with the so-called "Race-biological Institutions" in various countries, so by no means do I want to single out the Germans as the only purveyors of a certain breed of thinking. So while this is not a reductio ad Hitlerium argument, one must be vigilant of the possible consequences of unchecked hate speech, "Volksverhetzung", "Aanzetten tot haat", "Agitation publique" or whatever you wish to call it.
As for those who actually use social media to spread poppycock, hate-speech, racism, bile, xenophobia and religious fervour alike, I for one do think it would be great if these people be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The law is there to be enforced, whether you intend to kill, steal, embezzle, con or incite to hatred. But the lack of editorial decisions from Facebook's side is something they should indeed be held accountable for. Facebook serves as a news outlet to some 38% of the American public. I shudder to think about that, given the amount of moronic vitriol and cat video's that permeate that network. The likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter wield quite a bit of power, and their corporate nature drives them to shun any form of responsibility.
From my perspective, it is heartwarming to see a nation state such as Germany finally spring into action to protect the education, sovereignty, privacy and safety of its citizens by holding these media corporations (which they are by now) accountable for the information they provide to said citizenry.
Terrorism is a statistically completely irrelevant cause of death. 2014 was the most peaceful year in human history. Recently, only 0.9% of all deaths are violence related and there are indications this is on the decline. Life Expectancy is rising, Child Mortality is dropping and life seems to be moving on. Apart from Cancer, Heart, Lungs and stuff like Malaria, traffic is a big one we should be worried about, really. Having a staircase in one's house is, for instance, more dangerous than the notion of terrorism ever will be.
Now, here come the news outlets. Apart from all this "Educating and Informing The People", "Freedom of Speecht" and "Checks and Balances" bullshit, the press and media generally exist to make money. In some cases they even seem to exist for more Machiavellian purposes, but to make money is a biggie. So when something as statistically insignificant as a terror attack happens *Close By*, the news explodes. It's like a gigantic circle jerk in which everyone and their uncle needs to fill yards and yards of column space or air time to talk about What May Have Happened, Why It May Have Happened or What May Happen Next and Which Refugees To Treat Like Shit Because Of This.
So generally speaking, the Media seem to take events like this and add to the sense of fear that terrorists would have instilled in the citizenry. As such, I'm beginning to view the media as culpable in the problem of terrorism, because any wacko can get a world wide platform by misbehaving in an instant. Social media are even worse when it comes to knee jerk bullshit and mass panic.
Which leads me to Slashdot. I think Slashdot is a haven of alternative news which offers refreshing takes on things, interesting articles, sometimes brilliant and inspired discussions. It is a news aggregator / outlet that works differently, feels differently and makes me feel at home in more than a few ways.
I am sad to see that even here, there needs to be a discussion on Paris. I came here to avoid that news. Moreover, I came here to avoid certain discussions about Guns, Islam, The Administration and Refugees. Because these discussions are boringly predictable, polarised, fraught with no-fact-debates and generally just plain stupid.
Well, mate, if you'd then bother to learn someone else's language for a change, you could enjoy the Dutch NPO, the French France Televisions SA, the German ARD, Sveriges Television and many other public broadcasters.
Now I would not mind at all if you watched programmes on the Dutch NPO which I payed for with my NL TV License fees. It's just that you can't. Because you're uni-lingual. The fact that the average German, French, Dutchman and Scandinavian can watch your shows because we hablo Ingles and possibly few other languages doesn't change that fact.
So instead of bickering about me enjoying the odd re-run of Allo Allo and nature shows narrated by Sir Attenborough, I suggest you go back to school.
Now you might say that I respond harshly to your comments, but please remember that the people in the smaller countries and smaller language zones bend over backwards to accommodate the English speaking world. One fringe benefit of me watching your BBC would be that you can actually get a fish and chips in Amsterdam, and we'll happily converse with you about the weather in Wales while we serve it to you from the English menu you just read.
So is it worth your TV license fee to not have to feel like a hapless idiot when you travel the mainland?
You manage to misrepresent transgenderism in one fell and foul swoop there.
Gender, in terms of how the brain is wired, is actually wired into the system before the testes drop or not. To cut a very long and technical story short, you are mentally wired to be male or female regardless of how your body turns out. For a small percentage of society, this means that their brains don't match their physical attributes, and the consequence of this is indeed a life long quest to become "right".
Stigmas and taboos are quite counterproductive for these individuals, and what Russia is doing is a gross violation of human rights. Then again, I don't expect much sympathy from US citizens, because the LGBT community is still under siege in the US as well. Laws are discriminatory, and public discourse is not very accepting of these folks. All you need to do is watch some Fox News and you'll get the gist.
Characterising the transgendered plight as "dress up in women's lingerie" only serves to exacerbate this situation, even if the intentions are quite OK.
"Capitalism" is really quite a useless term. It frames the discussion in terms of a dichotomy that does not exist in reality. The Americans have now even started equating Socialism with Communism and by proxy of that full fledged Marxism, and then turn around to oppose this with "Freedom" or a "Free Market".
Now I have said this in another post, but there is no such thing as a free market. A free market has an unlimited amount of sellers, an unlimited amount of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. As soon as there's a discrepancy between the supply and demand side, like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies the market isn't truly "free".
Then as soon as you regulate the market in any way, shape or form it isn't truly free. Now for those libertarians out there, or those "no-government is good government" folks on this forum: "Capitalism" as translated into free market doctrine really sucks at morality. Do you agree that child labour ought to be illegal? Are you against slavery? Do you think some oversight should exist as to the circumstances under which labour is performed? If you answer yes to any of those questions, you yourself do not believe in a "free" market.
This means we can quit demonizing "Socialists" because of their alleged "anti-freedom" stance, and we can get on with having some constructive discussions on how we want to redistribute assets so as to maximize the welfare of the world population as a whole. Preferably based on fact rather than faintly religious notions.
Now the notions of a "free market", the "trickle-down effect" and most importantly the "rational actor model" that have been put forth by the Chicago school of economics and their ilk have been proven to be wrong and ineffective countless times. It should become clear if you look at the state of the US today, actually. For reference I would point towards the collected works of Joseph Stiglitz and Ha-Joon Chang.
Yet the public at large seems to want to keep paying lip service to these faulty theories and continues politicians, bankers and businessmen to act in accordance to that which is known to fuck up.
If you are saying people act according to "mutual benefit" you are a proponent of the "rational actor model" I talked about earlier, and that notion is bunk. This is not only made clear by Kahneman et al, but if you delve into George Lakoff's work you'll see that even our definition of rational thought is somewhat fictionalized. Dan Gardner will allow you to see how there is nothing rational about our calculation of risk and Barry Schwartz and Dan Azriely have written volumes on how we are impacted by choices.
To cut a long story short: Cognitive science has long proven that we wouldn't know what "mutual benefit" really is if it kicked us in the ass, which is illustrated by the ever narrowing of the definition of "rationality" in the rational actor model. So yes, the invisible hand as you define it is fictitious at best and completely religious at its worst.
We need government and we need to make some moral decisions as to the kind of society we wish to live in, and enforce that notion through the rule of law, also where economic policy and redistribution of wealth are concerned.
But then religion has already lost all meaning. It just doesn't realize it yet.
I understand the need for some notion of spirituality because people can be freaked out by the prospect of a finite and largely meaningless life, so in order not to go insane I guess some of us need imaginary friends and a promise of an afterlife.
However, in daily life neither my religious neighbors nor I do not ask god to charge our mobile phones. We use a charger that was built and engineered by mankind. Similarly, I don't need a god for morality either. Simple empathy will enable us to do the right thing. We can recognize suffering and decide to try and end or minimize it all by ourselves.
I'd even go as far as to say that a morality that hinges on an external factor dictating it is weaker than a fully internalized and autonomous morality.
Given that opening statement, there is no practical and discernible difference between a religion, dogma and ideology.
So much nuance needed here.
It is easy to look at Islam and consider it to be the root of all evil. Quite frankly this strikes me as a clean cut case of confusing correlation with causality.
Let me start by saying I do not condone violence of any kind, whether it's sectarian for any religion we know of or just plain assholery. So I don't condone the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Gaza or the invasion of Charlie Hebdo's premise in any way, shape or form. Too many innocent and civilian lives are squandered tragically by all of these actions. Whether it's Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the IRA, ETA, IDF or Rote Armee Fraktion, US Army or Halliburton that's engaging in violence, I don't care. It's all the same barbarism to me when civilians die.
However, I do find myself at odds with the notion of freedom of speech. I'll illustrate by means of a small segway:
Ha-Joon Chang, the Korean economist has once stated that there is no such thing as a free market. A free market has an unlimited amount of sellers, an unlimited amount of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. As soon as there's a discrepancy between the supply and demand side, like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies the market isn't truly "free".
Then as soon as you regulate the market it isn't truly free. Now for those libertarians out there, or those "no-government is good government" folks on this forum: "Capitalism" as translated into free market doctrine really sucks at morality. Do you agree that child labour ought to be illegal? Are you against slavery? Do you think some oversight should exist as to the circumstances under which labour is performed? If you answer yes to any of those questions, you yourself do not believe in a "free" market.
Similarly, my Constitution's Article 7 is colloquially called the Free Speech article, but really what it states is that Censorship is illegal as long as what you are saying, writing or broadcasting DOES NOT BREAK THE LAW. So the law says that hate-speech, slander and lastly "mis-representation of facts for commercial purposes" are all illegal.
As such, you are totally free to think what you like, but you can't say what you like. By that token: Nobody batted an eye when the Dutch courts forbade an organisation that openly advocated pedophilia. In this case, the consensus is that "free speech" should not be so free, think of the children, etc. But as soon as we are looking at insulting religion, speech should be "free".
Now if we look at the colonialist forces that shaped much of the Muslim world, all the way from Afghanistan to Syria, from Baghdad to Algiers, we should also get a notion of the socio-economic circumstances that arose after our collective (French, English, American and to a degree Belgian) intervention in those areas. And we can then safely conclude that those circumstances are highly conducive for violent crime: There is poverty, no rule of law, borders are haphazardly drawn across cultural and religious boundaries, and 19-35 year old males regularly have no prospect of procreating.
Then quite a few people fled these colonial FUBARs, and settled in Europe. This is about 4.5% of Europe's population, and they have been marginalized, discriminated and even treated with violence. If you look at the amount of violent attacks on mosques in the last 12 years, the list is staggeringly large as compared to attacks on synagogues or papers such as Charlie Hebdo.
So we are dealing with an impoverished population that has residual colonial trauma and is constantly being attacked from all angles, and then we wonder why violent excess enters the picture.
This is a very long winded way of saying that as far as taking the piss at Muslims is concerned, White Privilege becomes part of the equation. We can mock the RC Church more freely, because we are the elite and it is an institute of our own making. However, when we mock Islam we need to be mindful of the socio-economic and power structure we created in which these people survive.
It's akin to the difference between a black US citizen dropping the N-word vis a vis a white middle class male dropping the N-word. We need to be more cautious about viewing the whole picture if we are to solve radicalism in our societies.
And boy let me tell you, the items that are controversial in the USofA are not the same ones that are controversial over here in Europe. Of course we get a smattering of IS and Ebola related news this time of year, but in general political discourse tends to not involve discussions on what one should be doing with one's penis, vagina, uterus or the contents thereof, but much more about the re-distribution of wealth and the state of law.
I see that both in Israel and the US, to be honest: A focus on the irrelevant. Case in point being that the security craze and hype surrounding 9/11 has caused a spike in ground traffic that killed more people than the 9/11 incident itself. It seems to me that both the US and Israel have a greater tendency than normal to hype relatively small risk factors and completely and blatantly ignore evidence for large looming risk factors, even in the face of mounting evidence.
The more progressive a society gets, the more balanced people's view is on risk. Whether the one causes the other or vice versa, I do not know. The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland are decidedly more earthy in their political discourse, even if obviously we do have some fear mongering rotten apples. Case in point in the Netherlands being the fascist reactionaries that crawled from under all the rocks in the country in the wake of the discussion on whether blackface is a good idea, but I digress.
So while the findings are interesting, firstly 83 subjects is a piss in the pond and secondly the original poster is right: Is this finding universal for all the cultures we find on the globe?
Lastly, by US standards I would be a flaming liberal. There's nothing wrong with smoking a doozie, I am atheist, I think abortion isn't even worth a discussion since babies only really become sentient some 2 months after birth, obviously I am in favour of gay marriage and last but not least I think the proliferation of weapons amongst civilians (and even the army, but I digress again) is a really really silly idea.
However, I self identify as a Left Winger in terms of economic re-distribution politics, as a Constitutional Conservative when it comes to safeguarding the state of law in my country, a Conservationist in terms of the environment and indeed finally as a Liberal in terms of sexual practice and tolerance and the tolerance for people of other color. But when it comes to my atheism I am quite extremist. I think people who are god-believers are simply lesser beings and I do strive to stamp out god-belief and related silliness wherever I encounter it.
Now I wonder, given all my views and thoughts on things, whether I would be deemed a "Conservative" or "Liberal", and what selection criteria would be used for classifying me such. Because none of those were mentioned in the article.
Why post this anonymous? Now it won't be +5Funny.
You, as an individual, are not statistically relevant, even if what you describe is the actual truth. I say that last bit because infants, as soon as they are born, start sucking up language from their parents / caretakers, and I cannot really imagine you growing up in a total vacuum.
I do tend to agree most people learn best from people, because of the simple reason that there is so much evidence all around us that supports that claim. It is wired into us to mimic and learn from the people in our environment.
Information security and adhering to all manner of certification, both in terms of physical security and compliance to information management regulation, is usually a lot more stringent in a decent (professional) cloud environment than in people's own data center.
I'd be inclined to disagree with your assessment of hosted infrastructure, although quite honestly I am apprehensive about going to the cloud myself.
Maybe it's a psychological thing.
Sorry to burst your bubble there.
I'm afraid to say I've been bleeding blue (HP Blue, not Dell, IBM, eh... never mind) since the dawn of time.
Yes they are. I work in the Information Management software division as a pre-sales, and I'm pretty much paid to tell subsets of the above to customers.
- We are our own reference customer for Connected backup for end-points.
- We are our own reference customer for TRIM, now known as HP Records Manager 8.0
- We are our own reference customer for Database Archiving, now known as HP Application Information Optimiser
So all of that is publicly available in white-papers and case-studies.
The fact that we're building a public cloud infrastructure per country in Europe is also very much not a secret. If we want to get or retain EU based cloud customers, we need to be able to guarantee that their data remains their data and that it won't fall prey to third parties, chiefly amongst which the US government.
In terms of data center consolidation and cost savings associated with that, the strategy internal IT is following is largely in line with the Data Center concept we sell as Converged Infrastructure, Cloud System Matrix and Cloud System One.
Moreover our external web presence is run on the newly launched project Moonshot, in which you can currently cram some 45 servers in 5U rack space, which will soon get uplifted to 180 servers in 5U rack space.
All of this is a clean cut case of eating your own cooking, and then using that fact to market the underlying technologies.
So yes, I am very much convinced HP is comfortable with me sharing this publicly.
We've consolidate all office application servers to 5 data centers, one per continent. Then we've rolled out end-point backup for some 80.000 laptops in the field and some 150.000 more PC's around offices across the world which includes legal hold capabilities. Each country in which we're active has a number of mobile device options for telephony, most of them being Android and Win8 based nowadays since WebOS got killed.
Then we're in the process of building a European infrastructure where we have data centers for managed customer environments in every major market in Europe. I am currently not aware of what's going on in APJ or South America. This is important in Europe however, because managed European customers don't want to see their data end up in the States, and the same goes for those that use our cloud offerings.
physical local IT staff presence in all countries has been minimized to a skeleton crew, not only because of data center consolidation but also because of the formation of a global IT helpdesk in low cost countries, and the rise of self-service portals.
The plethora of databases we had internally has been Archived using Application Information Optimizer for structured data archiving. We are our own biggest reference customer in this regard. On top of that we've beefed up our VPN access portals across the world so as to accommodate road warriors logging in from diverse locations.
Lastly, we use our own Records Management software suite to generate 8.000.000. unique records per day. These are archived for a particular retention period (7 years I believe) for auditing purposes.
You are so right. "Ruminations" can be interesting, but for video presentations I vastly prefer TED talks. They have it nailed down 9 out of 10 times. This video presentation is boring beyond belief, which is a shame because the topic in and of itself is interesting.
Then what this guy is saying is directly opposed to what Tesla is saying on combustion engines. Also he doesn't seem to have a good grasp of what a cab company does. I don't know about the US, but taxi's here are used to transport the elderly to hospitals and doctors for check-ups and whatnot, and also to allow for mobility of elderly. This includes longer trips on the municipality's dime. As such "only one station" to fuel up taxi's is absolute poppycock.
Cut a long story short, I don't think Peter Wayner sounds like he can predict shit from shinola.
Why was this comment not modded +5 Sarcastic? Or at least +3 Funny?
Lord knows we've all got our opinions on Big Brother, Jersey Shore (Oh Oh Cherso, anyone?) and quite a few of these so called "Reality" shows.