I can somewhat attest to that - having lived in the UK from 2004 to 2009... In 2008 I tried taking some photos from our offices in Canary Wharf. I looked at the whether forecast every day before deciding whether to take camera+lenses+tripod to work that day....and for many of those days, the "visibility" forecast of the MET was pretty much the opposite of what happened -- hardly any visibility on days when it said "good" visibility -- and clear views on many days where the forecast was for poor visibility. In the end, I lugged the stuff around most days, waiting for days of good whether with low winds (no access to balcony if winds were more than 10 miles per hour (average)...
So, you think that supercomputer will only figure out whether it rains on the day?
Or do you think it might forecast a little more information about the day as well? (air pressure, wind, temperature,...)
I laud the attempt to improve the models behind the forecasts - though, I don't think I'd buy options on winter fuel for 2017/2018 yet, simply because of that computer.
On the other hand - if you know the average chance of precipitation for a given day in the American midwest - I don't think it would help you predict in which area the next tornado might strike. Or whether the next hurricane makes landfall, where it will make it and at what strength...
Any advance on increasing the predictions here has the potential to save lives and livelihoods -- even if it might not be enough to save someone's house in the path of the storm.
_IF_ someone wanted to rename London after any singer - that might be just about fine... _IF_ that someone chose Freddy Mercury over David Bowie - hmmmm - that person might be in trouble...
Sorry, The Man Who Sold The World pretty much reigns supreme in London... As much as I like Freddy Mercury - Bowie would be the better tribute...
And as for naming an asteroid after Freddy Mercury - fine by me - even the reference to a "shooting star leaping through the sky" kind of makes sense.
I just hope that this asteroid will never head towards Earth - otherwise the song title "Don't stop me now!" might be reaaaaally bad...;-)
Well - getting you on the UID is the easy part, oh young one!;-)
With my displays - nah - my plain 30" 2560x1600 is still fine by me. At work I only have two (portrait mode) 24" full HD screens - also "only" 2400x1920...
As for the development tools - it always depends on what I work on - Java development - I still use eclipse (I have to use some plugins to interface with systems that aren't available for other IDEs... That said - I still think eclipse is decent enough to work with), For anything non-Java, I still use emacs -- sooo old, but it just works fine; and everything can be easily controlled by keyboard -- the mouse/touchpad is only a "last resort" tool....as for emails - still remember pine (or - alpine, as it was called in the last few iterations) - still the best tool for my imap space...:-)
You do remember older flicks like Sneakers etc and their depiction of phreaking - with the perpetrators actually monitoring how many hops the called party manage to hack their way back through.
This will be the same - but instead of hacking multiple phone exchanges, you have to hack into multiple systems, before you attack your "true" destination.
On the positive side, this might be a good thing - if a hacker breaks into multiple systems to build up a chain of hosts to route his attack through, that attacker now even has an incentive to harden all intermediate systems he broke into, just to slow down the "counter-attack"...
Better yet - you go out and do your crime, while you have someone else in a car with tinted screens drive around to paint a big fat middle-finger on the map for the police to find...?
"Human beings have the natural tendency to expect philanthropy when it comes to an ideal future." that's an interesting statement, particularly if you put it into context with the kind of vitriol you might hear from people opposing a Universal Basic Income...
That's not to say whether you yourself might be pro/con UBI,... But a lot of economic talk seems to imply that the future will be better (even if there will be fewer jobs - but none really want to address where the consumers should come from in a society (largely) without income...
I'm not saying Facebook is useless - it just isn't the tool for me.
I get updates from friends, but I prefer to have them face to face, say, over dinner - which seems to become a bit of a lost art for many. Just look around, even sometimes you see groups of people sitting together in pubs, and there faces still glued to their smartphones only. That's what I would call wasted opportunities.
And I finding out about interesting people? Was that really something new? Either way, I seem to find out about them with or without facebook.
Free VoIP features - nice - I've got that with my phone (flat rate)... Yes, for that I pay, but I'm free of advertising - which I value more. (Even here on slashdot, for a while there was an option to just pay for ad-free pages - sounded great to me, and I happily paid some money to slashdot to have ads suppressed -- yes, an ad-blocker would achieve the same, but I do see that even slashdot might occasionally need to make some money)...
Messaging? Ever heard of email? Sounds fairly easy - no ads on my mailhost either.
Stupid casual online games? Sorry -
Seriously - congrats to you, if facebook is the tool for you. It isn't for me. And I trust that you will not engage in too many new products / services for extended periods if you don't see them fulfilling any needs for you - you just wouldn't have the time for facebook any more.
I've tried lots of services on the Internet - but I also stop using services and deleting my accounts, if I don't see the point of them for _me_.
OK, let's clarify - I've been on other social networks at the time (e.g. linkedin) - and in those I did see the utility.
In Facebook, even in friends I have who had been on it for quite a while - I don't see it, apart from being a platform for advertising - and I don't see why I should feed facebook in exchange for ads I don't want in the first place.
Also, at the time I deactivated the account, I had somewhere around (IIRC) 80-90 facebook connections - and I did put on my wall that I didn't see the point of the platform asking my connections to show me what the point of it would be within a week or I'd delete the account - a week (and 0 responses) later, I deleted the account.
The connections to the people I was connected with before, I still have - and apart from that, I'm just happy not to have fed more personal information about myself to them.
But, more generally, don't you start things that you need to invest time into with a purpose in mind? (you start learning to drive long before you're allowed to drive on public roads with a view to driving later. You get vaccinated against tropic diseases before a holiday in the tropics specifically in order to prevent catching a tropic disease. But - what other thing is there where you just take it up, and continue paying for it for weeks/months/longer, if you don't see a specific purpose for it. The only specific purpose I see in facebook is selling me ads - sorry, no thanks. Not for me.
It does confirm that it was the right decision to close and delete my facebook account 3 or 4 weeks after using facebook and still not seeing the point of it.
Now seeing how busy facebook seems to become in policing what its users might want to see, good riddance Facebook......not nearly ruing as much having signed up here a "while" ago...;-)
OK, by that token, you'll be happy if, say, a Nigerian company sells cancer medicine that is deemed safe in Nigeria to the US market without any meddling by the FDA, right?
Every market can regulate whatever they want - and, what might be a difficult concept for you to grasp is, that Netflix wouldn't be forced to sell Estonian films in the US. But the cost of business to enter the European market might have to be a certain percentage of films made in other languages.
As for your comment about the quality of stuff French filmmakers produce -
a) The US industry seems to have a knack for rather remaking stuff than taking over others - even if it's originating from another English-speaking country (e.g. the UK): See "The Office", the sucky US-version of "Red Dwarf",...
b) Given the a lot smaller size of other countries movie industries - have a look at how many of them were remade in the US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/......and that is not just old movies but recent ones as well...
You're forgetting another important point - with one person stuck to the car, google might recoup some of the research funding by exposing their captive audience (i.e. poor schmuck on the fender) to "relevant ads" (lawyers, health professionals)...
OK, let's keep it in perspective - a shop owner treats customers well to generate repeat business.
So, why the expectation that privatized prisons won't do everything they can to generate repeat business? Charging for video "visits" makes money - and if on top of that, it has the side effect of increasing recidivism - who ends up making a profit on it?
story: "Greece's Former Finance Minister Explains" you say: "taking advice from Greece"
How would you like your statement read?
- "Taking advice from Greece..." (as if the advice came from the nation of Greece, not a Greek citizen -- which is false - as it came from a citizen, not the state)
- "Taking advice from Greece..." (as in advice from ANYBODY Greek - as if the Greek nationality was a guarantee that it's bullshit? -- which could be considered racist; or incitement to racial hatred)
Personally, I don't support UBI - but not because I don't think it wouldn't work -- but that I think UBI _alone_ isn't enough. (And - no, I'm not a communist either, nor do I believe that everyone should have exactly the same;...) UBI just has a couple of small flaws in it, that I gather will make it unsustainable.
How much will the EU taxpayers have to cough up in tax money to make up for lost money on greek government debt? You might not want to pay the Greek government - but banks who have given money to Greece will certainly recuperate that money - either through charges levied against their customers, or through more government bail-outs.
In the meantime, it doesn't help us non-Greeks either, if Greece gets driven into a default without helping them to get to a place where they can repay the money.
Historical hint: Think of the Marshall plan that helped build up Germany after WW-II. Now Germany is one of the richest nations - but without the Marshall plan it would likely not have managed to grow effectively -- with another war the most likely outcome. (Just like war reparations after WW-I gave rise to an atmosphere that allowed Hitler to gain power).
So, if one cannot find work, he should get sterilized - because if you can't find work, it is _proven_ that your offspring must be equally "worthless" to society?
If that were so - how come we could progress to the current state? Surely, 100 years ago, no-one had the kind of computer skills we have now? So, right now, people with computer skills are in existence, that are the offspring of people that didn't have these skills.
You're forgetting something - 2-3 centuries ago, that would have been easily possible - as long as you find a little plot of land somewhere (even if in the middle of a forest) then you would have a good chance of a means to support yourself.
Now - find a place, where you are allowed to plant something of your own - at first, you'd need to find a plot of land that doesn't belong to anyone - and that, by now, in Europe is almost impossible. If land is arable, it is owned by someone. If it's a forest, it's owned by someone. The times where you could make a living for yourself without being "dependent" on someone else - namely, someone who is willing to pay for your services.
So, what will the future hold for the "lower qualified" jobs that robots eat up? They can't _force_ a company (or _any_ company) to hire them to work for a living wage.
But, before you try your line "live and die by your own efforts, not mine" - before you go as far as declaring whose lives are worth being kept or allowed to starve - just think about how secure your own job will be 10-20 years down the line. I've seen my net "middle-class" income being reduced over the last 12 years (through cut-downs by some employers - and other employers not willing to pay as much as the previous ones -- even though they make more profits; so it's not a cost necessity to go through the cuts -- it's just that it's possible, as there is a lot more competition from outsourcing jobs to lower-wage countries).
Another thing you should think about is the implications of what you're saying - "living and dying by your own efforts", this sounds "natural" in the most basic sense - it's what happens in the animal kingdom, but do remember that this is also what drives conflict in nature (the fight for survival). While your sentence seems to imply "either earn your living or go die quietly somewhere away from me" - rest assured, that it will rather create MORE violence, not less. (all the while also foregoing those "low-earners" as customers for your businesses - which might also be a chance for growth.
The current system of capitalism is too transfixed on "optimizing" (think: economies of scale; automation;...) - and at the same time leaving governments unable to really care for their citizens, as more high paying jobs (and hence high income tax payers) get eroded, while at the same time, profits are being moved across the globe so that the companies also don't pay taxes that would make up for the shortfall from the eroding income tax base.
Your "fight for yourself" approach has only a very short term usefulness - so it's a great model as far as people in their 80s are concerned: the kind of people who do not need to care whether the whole system will break down 10 years down the line -- because they most likely be gone by then.
Sure, I guess the Mexicans won't care too much about how thick an ice sheet is covering the US, as long as you stay north of the wonderful and lovely Trump wall...
Strange logic you use: you refer to "the hordes of neanderthals coming our way here", but the Neanderthals were an ancient race of human named after a find IN GERMANY! So, from the German perspective, isn't "the hordes of neanderthals coming our way" more like a descriptions of Germans streaming into the country?
If you mean to say "the hordes of primitives", then may be have a chat with some of them and find out who and what they are, instead of just following Pegida hate-speech about people you most likely haven't even met.
As for what happened in Cologne on December 31st - you're right, it was disgusting, and we need to put a stop to it - and crimes committed that night need to be investigated and the culprits punished -- just the same way, as if they were just run-of-the-mill German criminals. But - are you really trying to imply that the number of rapes on that night would be disproportionately higher than rapes of German women by Germans? How many charges of *rape* have been filed? (Note: be clear: you speak of those that "raped" in Cologne - how many was that?)
Besides - if you really think you have any serious point to make, why do you hide under "Anonymous Coward"?
On social media I see that a lot of people just send connection requests everywhere, but rarely follow up with actual conversation. (this particularly goes for job agents on linkedin - who will spam you with "would like to connect" queries without ever having heard of you, having anything like a job opportunity that might be right for you, or even asking for more information about you. Seems the only thing they're really after is having "more connections".
So, is having more facebook "friends" really an indication of more connectedness?
If so, if we're all more connected, why is there a rising partisanship among people?
If we're more connected, why do we have so much trouble helping refugees from warzones? And - not just in the US, but in Europe, too -- Germany has taken on a huge number of refugees in the last year - but at the same time, we've also experienced a strong rise in anti-immigration sentiment. I'm feeling ashamed seeing the rise of "anti-islam" (or more generally just plain xenophobic) Pegida movement in Germany - rising from one of the states with the lowest percentage of foreigners...
Yes, connectedness truly seems on the rise.
I had given facebook a try a few years back, but dropped back out of it and asked for my account to be deleted a few months later -- good riddance. I just don't know why they think that by counting how many people you have as "friends" on facebook is a good indicator for how connected we are...
Ever thought that the sharing of information isn't the problem, but other things the Internet enabled?
Say, you can find qualified people in other countries with lower wages and have them work for you over the Internet - thereby adding downward pressure on the very same jobs in your own country. At the same time, somewhat unsurprisingly, there doesn't seem to be downward pressure on CEO jobs - even though I'd bet you could find qualified MBAs in "cheaper labour force" countries...
Slashdot Mirror
I can somewhat attest to that - having lived in the UK from 2004 to 2009... In 2008 I tried taking some photos from our offices in Canary Wharf. I looked at the whether forecast every day before deciding whether to take camera+lenses+tripod to work that day. ...and for many of those days, the "visibility" forecast of the MET was pretty much the opposite of what happened -- hardly any visibility on days when it said "good" visibility -- and clear views on many days where the forecast was for poor visibility. In the end, I lugged the stuff around most days, waiting for days of good whether with low winds (no access to balcony if winds were more than 10 miles per hour (average)...
So, you think that supercomputer will only figure out whether it rains on the day?
Or do you think it might forecast a little more information about the day as well? (air pressure, wind, temperature, ...)
I laud the attempt to improve the models behind the forecasts - though, I don't think I'd buy options on winter fuel for 2017/2018 yet, simply because of that computer.
On the other hand - if you know the average chance of precipitation for a given day in the American midwest - I don't think it would help you predict in which area the next tornado might strike. Or whether the next hurricane makes landfall, where it will make it and at what strength...
Any advance on increasing the predictions here has the potential to save lives and livelihoods -- even if it might not be enough to save someone's house in the path of the storm.
I see a little snag in your plan...
_IF_ someone wanted to rename London after any singer - that might be just about fine...
_IF_ that someone chose Freddy Mercury over David Bowie - hmmmm - that person might be in trouble...
Sorry, The Man Who Sold The World pretty much reigns supreme in London... As much as I like Freddy Mercury - Bowie would be the better tribute...
And as for naming an asteroid after Freddy Mercury - fine by me - even the reference to a "shooting star leaping through the sky" kind of makes sense.
I just hope that this asteroid will never head towards Earth - otherwise the song title "Don't stop me now!" might be reaaaaally bad... ;-)
Well - getting you on the UID is the easy part, oh young one! ;-)
With my displays - nah - my plain 30" 2560x1600 is still fine by me. At work I only have two (portrait mode) 24" full HD screens - also "only" 2400x1920...
As for the development tools - it always depends on what I work on - Java development - I still use eclipse (I have to use some plugins to interface with systems that aren't available for other IDEs... That said - I still think eclipse is decent enough to work with), ...as for emails - still remember pine (or - alpine, as it was called in the last few iterations) - still the best tool for my imap space... :-)
For anything non-Java, I still use emacs -- sooo old, but it just works fine; and everything can be easily controlled by keyboard -- the mouse/touchpad is only a "last resort" tool.
"though perhaps some companies have felt compelled to follow suit after the trend was identified among competitors."
Strange none of the competitors may have felt compelled to make the whole thing public after seeing the first competitor trying to deceive the market.
Sounds a bit like, it would be acceptable for anyone to steal/rape/kill/..., provided they saw someone else do it before them.
Stupid idea!
You do remember older flicks like Sneakers etc and their depiction of phreaking - with the perpetrators actually monitoring how many hops the called party manage to hack their way back through.
This will be the same - but instead of hacking multiple phone exchanges, you have to hack into multiple systems, before you attack your "true" destination.
On the positive side, this might be a good thing - if a hacker breaks into multiple systems to build up a chain of hosts to route his attack through, that attacker now even has an incentive to harden all intermediate systems he broke into, just to slow down the "counter-attack"...
Better yet - you go out and do your crime, while you have someone else in a car with tinted screens drive around to paint a big fat middle-finger on the map for the police to find...?
"Human beings have the natural tendency to expect philanthropy when it comes to an ideal future."
that's an interesting statement, particularly if you put it into context with the kind of vitriol you might hear from people opposing a Universal Basic Income...
That's not to say whether you yourself might be pro/con UBI, ... But a lot of economic talk seems to imply that the future will be better (even if there will be fewer jobs - but none really want to address where the consumers should come from in a society (largely) without income...
Eloquently put, young one!
Couldn't agree more.
I'm not saying Facebook is useless - it just isn't the tool for me.
I get updates from friends, but I prefer to have them face to face, say, over dinner - which seems to become a bit of a lost art for many. Just look around, even sometimes you see groups of people sitting together in pubs, and there faces still glued to their smartphones only. That's what I would call wasted opportunities.
And I finding out about interesting people? Was that really something new? Either way, I seem to find out about them with or without facebook.
Free VoIP features - nice - I've got that with my phone (flat rate)... Yes, for that I pay, but I'm free of advertising - which I value more. (Even here on slashdot, for a while there was an option to just pay for ad-free pages - sounded great to me, and I happily paid some money to slashdot to have ads suppressed -- yes, an ad-blocker would achieve the same, but I do see that even slashdot might occasionally need to make some money)...
Messaging? Ever heard of email? Sounds fairly easy - no ads on my mailhost either.
Stupid casual online games? Sorry -
Seriously - congrats to you, if facebook is the tool for you. It isn't for me.
And I trust that you will not engage in too many new products / services for extended periods if you don't see them fulfilling any needs for you - you just wouldn't have the time for facebook any more.
I've tried lots of services on the Internet - but I also stop using services and deleting my accounts, if I don't see the point of them for _me_.
OK, let's clarify - I've been on other social networks at the time (e.g. linkedin) - and in those I did see the utility.
In Facebook, even in friends I have who had been on it for quite a while - I don't see it, apart from being a platform for advertising - and I don't see why I should feed facebook in exchange for ads I don't want in the first place.
Also, at the time I deactivated the account, I had somewhere around (IIRC) 80-90 facebook connections - and I did put on my wall that I didn't see the point of the platform asking my connections to show me what the point of it would be within a week or I'd delete the account - a week (and 0 responses) later, I deleted the account.
The connections to the people I was connected with before, I still have - and apart from that, I'm just happy not to have fed more personal information about myself to them.
But, more generally, don't you start things that you need to invest time into with a purpose in mind? (you start learning to drive long before you're allowed to drive on public roads with a view to driving later. You get vaccinated against tropic diseases before a holiday in the tropics specifically in order to prevent catching a tropic disease. But - what other thing is there where you just take it up, and continue paying for it for weeks/months/longer, if you don't see a specific purpose for it. The only specific purpose I see in facebook is selling me ads - sorry, no thanks. Not for me.
It does confirm that it was the right decision to close and delete my facebook account 3 or 4 weeks after using facebook and still not seeing the point of it.
Now seeing how busy facebook seems to become in policing what its users might want to see, good riddance Facebook... ...not nearly ruing as much having signed up here a "while" ago... ;-)
Any company can offer anything anywhere?
OK, by that token, you'll be happy if, say, a Nigerian company sells cancer medicine that is deemed safe in Nigeria to the US market without any meddling by the FDA, right?
Every market can regulate whatever they want - and, what might be a difficult concept for you to grasp is, that Netflix wouldn't be forced to sell Estonian films in the US. But the cost of business to enter the European market might have to be a certain percentage of films made in other languages.
As for your comment about the quality of stuff French filmmakers produce - ...
a) The US industry seems to have a knack for rather remaking stuff than taking over others - even if it's originating from another English-speaking country (e.g. the UK): See "The Office", the sucky US-version of "Red Dwarf",
b) Given the a lot smaller size of other countries movie industries - have a look at how many of them were remade in the US - ...and that is not just old movies but recent ones as well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're forgetting another important point - with one person stuck to the car, google might recoup some of the research funding by exposing their captive audience (i.e. poor schmuck on the fender) to "relevant ads" (lawyers, health professionals)...
OK, let's keep it in perspective - a shop owner treats customers well to generate repeat business.
So, why the expectation that privatized prisons won't do everything they can to generate repeat business? Charging for video "visits" makes money - and if on top of that, it has the side effect of increasing recidivism - who ends up making a profit on it?
Little tip:
Be careful in your wording:
story: "Greece's Former Finance Minister Explains"
you say: "taking advice from Greece"
How would you like your statement read?
- "Taking advice from Greece..." (as if the advice came from the nation of Greece, not a Greek citizen -- which is false - as it came from a citizen, not the state)
- "Taking advice from Greece..." (as in advice from ANYBODY Greek - as if the Greek nationality was a guarantee that it's bullshit? -- which could be considered racist; or incitement to racial hatred)
Personally, I don't support UBI - but not because I don't think it wouldn't work -- but that I think UBI _alone_ isn't enough. (And - no, I'm not a communist either, nor do I believe that everyone should have exactly the same; ...) UBI just has a couple of small flaws in it, that I gather will make it unsustainable.
How much will the EU taxpayers have to cough up in tax money to make up for lost money on greek government debt?
You might not want to pay the Greek government - but banks who have given money to Greece will certainly recuperate that money - either through charges levied against their customers, or through more government bail-outs.
In the meantime, it doesn't help us non-Greeks either, if Greece gets driven into a default without helping them to get to a place where they can repay the money.
Historical hint: Think of the Marshall plan that helped build up Germany after WW-II. Now Germany is one of the richest nations - but without the Marshall plan it would likely not have managed to grow effectively -- with another war the most likely outcome. (Just like war reparations after WW-I gave rise to an atmosphere that allowed Hitler to gain power).
So, if one cannot find work, he should get sterilized - because if you can't find work, it is _proven_ that your offspring must be equally "worthless" to society?
If that were so - how come we could progress to the current state? Surely, 100 years ago, no-one had the kind of computer skills we have now? So, right now, people with computer skills are in existence, that are the offspring of people that didn't have these skills.
You're forgetting something - 2-3 centuries ago, that would have been easily possible - as long as you find a little plot of land somewhere (even if in the middle of a forest) then you would have a good chance of a means to support yourself.
Now - find a place, where you are allowed to plant something of your own - at first, you'd need to find a plot of land that doesn't belong to anyone - and that, by now, in Europe is almost impossible. If land is arable, it is owned by someone. If it's a forest, it's owned by someone. The times where you could make a living for yourself without being "dependent" on someone else - namely, someone who is willing to pay for your services.
So, what will the future hold for the "lower qualified" jobs that robots eat up? They can't _force_ a company (or _any_ company) to hire them to work for a living wage.
But, before you try your line "live and die by your own efforts, not mine" - before you go as far as declaring whose lives are worth being kept or allowed to starve - just think about how secure your own job will be 10-20 years down the line. I've seen my net "middle-class" income being reduced over the last 12 years (through cut-downs by some employers - and other employers not willing to pay as much as the previous ones -- even though they make more profits; so it's not a cost necessity to go through the cuts -- it's just that it's possible, as there is a lot more competition from outsourcing jobs to lower-wage countries).
Another thing you should think about is the implications of what you're saying - "living and dying by your own efforts", this sounds "natural" in the most basic sense - it's what happens in the animal kingdom, but do remember that this is also what drives conflict in nature (the fight for survival). While your sentence seems to imply "either earn your living or go die quietly somewhere away from me" - rest assured, that it will rather create MORE violence, not less. (all the while also foregoing those "low-earners" as customers for your businesses - which might also be a chance for growth.
The current system of capitalism is too transfixed on "optimizing" (think: economies of scale; automation; ...) - and at the same time leaving governments unable to really care for their citizens, as more high paying jobs (and hence high income tax payers) get eroded, while at the same time, profits are being moved across the globe so that the companies also don't pay taxes that would make up for the shortfall from the eroding income tax base.
Your "fight for yourself" approach has only a very short term usefulness - so it's a great model as far as people in their 80s are concerned: the kind of people who do not need to care whether the whole system will break down 10 years down the line -- because they most likely be gone by then.
Sure, I guess the Mexicans won't care too much about how thick an ice sheet is covering the US, as long as you stay north of the wonderful and lovely Trump wall...
So, basically google now says, that Apple's "single App Store" is the better model?
Strange logic you use: you refer to "the hordes of neanderthals coming our way here", but the Neanderthals were an ancient race of human named after a find IN GERMANY! So, from the German perspective, isn't "the hordes of neanderthals coming our way" more like a descriptions of Germans streaming into the country?
If you mean to say "the hordes of primitives", then may be have a chat with some of them and find out who and what they are, instead of just following Pegida hate-speech about people you most likely haven't even met.
As for what happened in Cologne on December 31st - you're right, it was disgusting, and we need to put a stop to it - and crimes committed that night need to be investigated and the culprits punished -- just the same way, as if they were just run-of-the-mill German criminals.
But - are you really trying to imply that the number of rapes on that night would be disproportionately higher than rapes of German women by Germans? How many charges of *rape* have been filed?
(Note: be clear: you speak of those that "raped" in Cologne - how many was that?)
Besides - if you really think you have any serious point to make, why do you hide under "Anonymous Coward"?
On social media I see that a lot of people just send connection requests everywhere, but rarely follow up with actual conversation. (this particularly goes for job agents on linkedin - who will spam you with "would like to connect" queries without ever having heard of you, having anything like a job opportunity that might be right for you, or even asking for more information about you. Seems the only thing they're really after is having "more connections".
So, is having more facebook "friends" really an indication of more connectedness?
If so, if we're all more connected, why is there a rising partisanship among people?
If we're more connected, why do we have so much trouble helping refugees from warzones? And - not just in the US, but in Europe, too -- Germany has taken on a huge number of refugees in the last year - but at the same time, we've also experienced a strong rise in anti-immigration sentiment. I'm feeling ashamed seeing the rise of "anti-islam" (or more generally just plain xenophobic) Pegida movement in Germany - rising from one of the states with the lowest percentage of foreigners...
Yes, connectedness truly seems on the rise.
I had given facebook a try a few years back, but dropped back out of it and asked for my account to be deleted a few months later -- good riddance.
I just don't know why they think that by counting how many people you have as "friends" on facebook is a good indicator for how connected we are...
Ever thought that the sharing of information isn't the problem, but other things the Internet enabled?
Say, you can find qualified people in other countries with lower wages and have them work for you over the Internet - thereby adding downward pressure on the very same jobs in your own country. At the same time, somewhat unsurprisingly, there doesn't seem to be downward pressure on CEO jobs - even though I'd bet you could find qualified MBAs in "cheaper labour force" countries...
Nonsense - it will be here "real soon now"!