Came here to find out which sports are elite, and discovered nothing, so I skimmed the article. Apparently it's tennis and cricket. You might have been thinking polo or something, but bear in mind that the article is only talking about elite sports in which left-handed players have an advantage.
Um, it is, for the most part.... I can't believe no one has even mentioned this
We have been mentioning it, we have been talking about both things. That is what this discussion is about. When the parent above said that, "the Electoral College is the only thing that allows smaller states to get a voice in the Executive branch of government," what he really meant was that it gives disproportionate weight to people who live in less populated states. And not by a small amount, as you suggest - someone living in Wyoming or Washington DC gets effectively three times as many votes as the average American.
The "winner takes all" aspect is what I was talking about above, where I said that it is a democratic principle that people elect who leads them, not states. It is because the electoral college allows states to vote rather than counting the votes of individual people that this is an issue at all.
the Electoral College is the only thing that allows smaller states to get a voice in the Executive branch of government
First: of course they would still have a voice, it just wouldn't be as loud. Instead, it would be proportional to the number of voters in those states.
Second, and more to the point: why do you think states should have any say at all in who gets elected president? This is an odd argument - the whole point of democracy is that voters, people, get to decide who leads them. Not states. And by-and-large we adhere to the one-man-one-vote principle, remember that whole "all men are created equal" business?... except when it comes to the electoral college.
"All men are are created equal... provided that they live in the same state. People who live in populous states can go fuck themselves."
Of course, most of this is blowing smoke anyway. The real consequence of the electoral college is that few people get any say at all in who gets elected president, whether they live in a big state or a small one. Only people who live in the swing states actually matter.
Because... the fact that she came into the US while Obama was president is a completely trivial piece of information. And... the first thing you said was relevant, though misleading - Fusion GPS is a research firm which was originally hired to look into Trump by a GOP client during the Republican primary, and then by the DNC during the general election. So that report was paid for partially by the DNC and partially by an unspecified Republican client. If you read the article at the link you posted it spells this out.
Regarding choice: the funny thing is that there is something in place to promote choice. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had a provision to require line sharing by the telecomms. In other words, selling access to the infrastructure at bulk rates in order to allow for third party ISPs. This has never been implemented thanks to the FCC's decision to classify ISPs as something other than telecommunications services. A decision which was corrected in 2015. The same correction which Ajit Pai is now talking about reversing.
Since the minority commissioners have very little power, standard practice is to nominate mainline opposition candidates to those positions in order to make the appointment of the majority candidates easier.
In other words, the fact that Obama nominated this guy is meaningless.
Banning the collection of large amounts of data and users is also regulation and therefore, according to the grandparent, keeps all your browsing in one AlGore-quality lock-box (whatever that is).
You're arguing with someone who is obviously opposed to "regulations" in their entirety, seemingly without knowing what regulations are. I doubt that this is going to get you anywhere.
He's allowed to have an opinion, even if it's dumb. People say the same thing whenever a celebrity disagrees with whatever bullshit they think is important: "Celebrities are just there to look pretty. They should speak only when spoken to."
The problem isn't that this guy says something or thinks something, the problem is that we are paying attention to him. He is not the problem, we are.
I have a neighbor (American) who lived in Costa Rica for six years. She talks about how awful American meat is in comparison, particularly the chicken.
Regarding what the parent said about historic smell and taste: it's only pretty recently (last couple hundred years) that food smells have been thought of as positive. In large old houses, where servants would have been expected to do the cooking, you can see that the dining room and the kitchen often have a lot of space between them. This is to keep the kitchen smells away from the diners.
Well... If you read between the lines when it comes to what he's talking about in the article, I think it might be his odd form of idealism that led to his support for that implementation of DRM. His primary concern is with "gatekeepers" controlling dialog between people. Some of that is violation of Network Neutrality, and some of that is proprietary closed information networks like Facebook. Facebook has all of these incestuous links which just take you to other parts of Facebook.
He wants people to use his thing: hyperlinks. They're an open protocol and allow for different sites to connect to one another, and he sees virtue in this. What he's said in the past was that he believed DRM to be inevitable in some form, so by standardizing it in this way it allows the web to maintain its interconnectivity instead of devolving into a bunch of closed platforms.
This is how I interpret it anyway. Maybe you're right about monetization factoring into it as well.
Once again: it works fine for me. Looking at Wikipedia right now on my Android tablet - I requested the desktop site, and that's what I got. Using my home wifi. If it's not your ISP then I don't know what your issue is, but maybe you should look deeper.
It does for me... Hm. Okay, it looks like maybe the reason that it's not working for you is because your mobile network provider is blocking desktop sites. In which case it has nothing to do with the browser. Try it over wifi and see if it still doesn't work.
That's irrational because it's unreasonable to expect children to be able to consent to a sexual act.
That's an odd way of phrasing it. The argument is usually not about reasonableness, it's about legality - it's illegal for children to consent to a sexual act, and thus any consent that they may give is legally void. Thus consent is not about ability, it's about permission.
I guess you're trying to imply that the motivation for the law is childrens' ignorance or inexperience or something, and that's certainly... one claim that people make. But setting aside the fact that no one is experienced with something until they've done it, let me remind you that the median age for losing your virginity in the United States is 17. And I believe it's lower if you include oral sex.
Not that Stallman's statement is really accurate, he should have qualified it. Something like: "I am skeptical of the claim that all voluntarily pedophilia harms children." This is obviously true, unless you want to argue that half of everyone in the US has been sexually traumatized.
The Firefox mobile version (or IceCat, if you're getting it from fDroid) has an option for this built-in, one that I find myself using most of the time. Works fine with Wikipedia.
It seems like you missed the point of the article entirely. The problem is not that people are doing what they want, the problem is that they can't. Or won't be able to. The idea is that, increasingly, it's these "gatekeepers" dictating to us what we should want. The article mentions the attack on net neutrality specifically, being something which prevents people from doing what they want. (Unless of course, what you want just happens to be exactly what will make the most money for ISPs.)
I don't know how you could have read that and heard exactly the opposite of what the article was saying.
Is that really what you think is going on here? People who don't agree with this position just can't understand it? Surely everyone would be on board if they could just "get it"?
Allow me to suggest an alternative explanation (just one, of many): a lot of our behavior is dictated by what we fear. Some people are afraid of being exploited in this way, and this is a reasonable fear - it's certainly something which happens a lot, and it can be a bad thing when it does. So their solution is to try to eliminate all possibility of this occurring, by forbidding romantic overtures in any situation where exploitation could possibly happen.
A second group has a different fear: they don't want to die alone. This is also a reasonable fear - it's certainly something which happens a lot, and it is almost without exception very bad indeed. This second group has their own solution - try to maximize romantic opportunities, so that when they finally do meet that special someone their hands won't be tied by some arbitrary restrictions.
I'm not offering a solution here, I just find it appalling at how quick people are to adopt absolutist solutions when they're confronted with difficult or complicated problems. (Human interaction always falls in this category.)
Lumping all these companies together is very misleading and unfair.
It's somewhat misleading, and somewhat unfair. If Facebook collects information on every aspect of your life and sells it to whoever pays them enough, then that's bad. If Facebook collects information on every aspect of your life and doesn't sell it whoever pays them enough, then that's somewhat less bad... but that's still plenty bad.
The point of the article, the thing that you're supposed to find alarming, is that you don't have control over your data. Whether it's one company or many companies who control your data is important, but in either scenario it's still not okay.
Somewhat related: I've noticed a lot of talk in the last decade, possibly more than previously, of "Alpha" status being a positive quality. In other words, the idea that it's a good thing to be an "Alpha Male." Which I've found to be a little alarming, it feels like a return to the 80s "greed is good" mentality.
I'm sure there are different ways to describe these, but the way I heard it back in the day: an Alpha is someone who demands to be in charge, at the center of things. Essentially a bully. A Beta is someone is someone who is capable, but can lead or follow as the situation demands. And Gammas and Deltas are basically different flavors of people who get exploited.
Maybe that's subject to interpretation. I'm sure that there are more flattering definitions of what Alphas are, but the bully definition does seem to fit with most of the rhetoric - "If you're not demanding all that is best for you, you must be a weakling beta. Not a proper manly alpha, the way you should be."
So anyway, that's a long way of saying that I'm not surprised that bullying in the workplace might be increasing.
It's certainly a reason why companies would want to stay out of politics, but there's a very compelling reason why they want to be involved in politics: political lobbying provides greater returns than any other investment.
Politics being politics, it's very difficult to do this without making enemies. Many companies take the approach of giving money to everyone, thereby maintaining "neutrality," but they make no friends this way either. Google is an up-and-comer in Washington, but they're one of the top ten financiers for lobbyists now. It makes sense that they'd have some enemies. The probe that the article mentions is probably just a sign that their efforts are paying off.
Does this prove that legalizing concealed carry causes violent crime rates to drop? No, because correlation does not prove causation.
That stupid article doesn't even prove correlation. Here is a graph of the homicide rate in DC since 1950. Handguns were banned in 1977 and reintroduced in 2007. Neither of those dates is significant on that graph.
How you interpret that lack of correlation, with no other supporting evidence, is more likely to be dependent on your own opinions than on anything substantial. You might say, "Look, see? Guns don't matter, so we shouldn't ban them." or, "Look, see? Banning guns in one tiny region that's surrounded by gun-permissive regions doesn't accomplish anything. So we need to ban them nation-wide." or, "Look, see? Writing an article about a single point of data is really dumb. Why are you reading the Washington Times anyway? You made that Washington/New York mistake again, didn't you? Repeat after me: the Washington Post and the New York Times are legitimate newspapers. The Washington Times and the New York Post are schlock."
Slashdot Mirror
Came here to find out which sports are elite, and discovered nothing, so I skimmed the article. Apparently it's tennis and cricket. You might have been thinking polo or something, but bear in mind that the article is only talking about elite sports in which left-handed players have an advantage.
Um, it is, for the most part. ... I can't believe no one has even mentioned this
We have been mentioning it, we have been talking about both things. That is what this discussion is about. When the parent above said that, "the Electoral College is the only thing that allows smaller states to get a voice in the Executive branch of government," what he really meant was that it gives disproportionate weight to people who live in less populated states. And not by a small amount, as you suggest - someone living in Wyoming or Washington DC gets effectively three times as many votes as the average American.
The "winner takes all" aspect is what I was talking about above, where I said that it is a democratic principle that people elect who leads them, not states. It is because the electoral college allows states to vote rather than counting the votes of individual people that this is an issue at all.
the Electoral College is the only thing that allows smaller states to get a voice in the Executive branch of government
First: of course they would still have a voice, it just wouldn't be as loud. Instead, it would be proportional to the number of voters in those states.
... except when it comes to the electoral college.
Second, and more to the point: why do you think states should have any say at all in who gets elected president? This is an odd argument - the whole point of democracy is that voters, people, get to decide who leads them. Not states. And by-and-large we adhere to the one-man-one-vote principle, remember that whole "all men are created equal" business?
"All men are are created equal... provided that they live in the same state. People who live in populous states can go fuck themselves."
Of course, most of this is blowing smoke anyway. The real consequence of the electoral college is that few people get any say at all in who gets elected president, whether they live in a big state or a small one. Only people who live in the swing states actually matter.
Because... the fact that she came into the US while Obama was president is a completely trivial piece of information. And... the first thing you said was relevant, though misleading - Fusion GPS is a research firm which was originally hired to look into Trump by a GOP client during the Republican primary, and then by the DNC during the general election. So that report was paid for partially by the DNC and partially by an unspecified Republican client. If you read the article at the link you posted it spells this out.
Regarding choice: the funny thing is that there is something in place to promote choice. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had a provision to require line sharing by the telecomms. In other words, selling access to the infrastructure at bulk rates in order to allow for third party ISPs. This has never been implemented thanks to the FCC's decision to classify ISPs as something other than telecommunications services. A decision which was corrected in 2015. The same correction which Ajit Pai is now talking about reversing.
Since the minority commissioners have very little power, standard practice is to nominate mainline opposition candidates to those positions in order to make the appointment of the majority candidates easier.
In other words, the fact that Obama nominated this guy is meaningless.
Banning the collection of large amounts of data and users is also regulation and therefore, according to the grandparent, keeps all your browsing in one AlGore-quality lock-box (whatever that is).
You're arguing with someone who is obviously opposed to "regulations" in their entirety, seemingly without knowing what regulations are. I doubt that this is going to get you anywhere.
He's allowed to have an opinion, even if it's dumb. People say the same thing whenever a celebrity disagrees with whatever bullshit they think is important: "Celebrities are just there to look pretty. They should speak only when spoken to."
The problem isn't that this guy says something or thinks something, the problem is that we are paying attention to him. He is not the problem, we are.
I have a neighbor (American) who lived in Costa Rica for six years. She talks about how awful American meat is in comparison, particularly the chicken.
Regarding what the parent said about historic smell and taste: it's only pretty recently (last couple hundred years) that food smells have been thought of as positive. In large old houses, where servants would have been expected to do the cooking, you can see that the dining room and the kitchen often have a lot of space between them. This is to keep the kitchen smells away from the diners.
Well... If you read between the lines when it comes to what he's talking about in the article, I think it might be his odd form of idealism that led to his support for that implementation of DRM. His primary concern is with "gatekeepers" controlling dialog between people. Some of that is violation of Network Neutrality, and some of that is proprietary closed information networks like Facebook. Facebook has all of these incestuous links which just take you to other parts of Facebook.
He wants people to use his thing: hyperlinks. They're an open protocol and allow for different sites to connect to one another, and he sees virtue in this. What he's said in the past was that he believed DRM to be inevitable in some form, so by standardizing it in this way it allows the web to maintain its interconnectivity instead of devolving into a bunch of closed platforms.
This is how I interpret it anyway. Maybe you're right about monetization factoring into it as well.
Once again: it works fine for me. Looking at Wikipedia right now on my Android tablet - I requested the desktop site, and that's what I got. Using my home wifi. If it's not your ISP then I don't know what your issue is, but maybe you should look deeper.
It does for me... Hm. Okay, it looks like maybe the reason that it's not working for you is because your mobile network provider is blocking desktop sites. In which case it has nothing to do with the browser. Try it over wifi and see if it still doesn't work.
It's truly amazing how the R's can't avoid putting the booger hook on the bang switch, taking off some tootsies in the process.
... Can't stop shooting themselves in the foot?
I have never described a finger as a booger hook, but I don't have your way with words Snotnose. Nice one.
That's irrational because it's unreasonable to expect children to be able to consent to a sexual act.
That's an odd way of phrasing it. The argument is usually not about reasonableness, it's about legality - it's illegal for children to consent to a sexual act, and thus any consent that they may give is legally void. Thus consent is not about ability, it's about permission.
I guess you're trying to imply that the motivation for the law is childrens' ignorance or inexperience or something, and that's certainly... one claim that people make. But setting aside the fact that no one is experienced with something until they've done it, let me remind you that the median age for losing your virginity in the United States is 17. And I believe it's lower if you include oral sex.
Not that Stallman's statement is really accurate, he should have qualified it. Something like: "I am skeptical of the claim that all voluntarily pedophilia harms children." This is obviously true, unless you want to argue that half of everyone in the US has been sexually traumatized.
The Firefox mobile version (or IceCat, if you're getting it from fDroid) has an option for this built-in, one that I find myself using most of the time. Works fine with Wikipedia.
It seems like you missed the point of the article entirely. The problem is not that people are doing what they want, the problem is that they can't. Or won't be able to. The idea is that, increasingly, it's these "gatekeepers" dictating to us what we should want. The article mentions the attack on net neutrality specifically, being something which prevents people from doing what they want. (Unless of course, what you want just happens to be exactly what will make the most money for ISPs.)
I don't know how you could have read that and heard exactly the opposite of what the article was saying.
Is that really what you think is going on here? People who don't agree with this position just can't understand it? Surely everyone would be on board if they could just "get it"?
Allow me to suggest an alternative explanation (just one, of many): a lot of our behavior is dictated by what we fear. Some people are afraid of being exploited in this way, and this is a reasonable fear - it's certainly something which happens a lot, and it can be a bad thing when it does. So their solution is to try to eliminate all possibility of this occurring, by forbidding romantic overtures in any situation where exploitation could possibly happen.
A second group has a different fear: they don't want to die alone. This is also a reasonable fear - it's certainly something which happens a lot, and it is almost without exception very bad indeed. This second group has their own solution - try to maximize romantic opportunities, so that when they finally do meet that special someone their hands won't be tied by some arbitrary restrictions.
I'm not offering a solution here, I just find it appalling at how quick people are to adopt absolutist solutions when they're confronted with difficult or complicated problems. (Human interaction always falls in this category.)
Lumping all these companies together is very misleading and unfair.
It's somewhat misleading, and somewhat unfair. If Facebook collects information on every aspect of your life and sells it to whoever pays them enough, then that's bad. If Facebook collects information on every aspect of your life and doesn't sell it whoever pays them enough, then that's somewhat less bad... but that's still plenty bad.
The point of the article, the thing that you're supposed to find alarming, is that you don't have control over your data. Whether it's one company or many companies who control your data is important, but in either scenario it's still not okay.
Who's the Omega?!? I'll kill him!
Blaming such a large cultural shift on our presidents seems unfounded. Rather, you should probably blame our presidents on a cultural shift.
Somewhat related: I've noticed a lot of talk in the last decade, possibly more than previously, of "Alpha" status being a positive quality. In other words, the idea that it's a good thing to be an "Alpha Male." Which I've found to be a little alarming, it feels like a return to the 80s "greed is good" mentality.
I'm sure there are different ways to describe these, but the way I heard it back in the day: an Alpha is someone who demands to be in charge, at the center of things. Essentially a bully. A Beta is someone is someone who is capable, but can lead or follow as the situation demands. And Gammas and Deltas are basically different flavors of people who get exploited.
Maybe that's subject to interpretation. I'm sure that there are more flattering definitions of what Alphas are, but the bully definition does seem to fit with most of the rhetoric - "If you're not demanding all that is best for you, you must be a weakling beta. Not a proper manly alpha, the way you should be."
So anyway, that's a long way of saying that I'm not surprised that bullying in the workplace might be increasing.
According to Gordon Haskett, they actually have dropped prices. By about 1%.
So. There you are.
It's certainly a reason why companies would want to stay out of politics, but there's a very compelling reason why they want to be involved in politics: political lobbying provides greater returns than any other investment.
Politics being politics, it's very difficult to do this without making enemies. Many companies take the approach of giving money to everyone, thereby maintaining "neutrality," but they make no friends this way either. Google is an up-and-comer in Washington, but they're one of the top ten financiers for lobbyists now. It makes sense that they'd have some enemies. The probe that the article mentions is probably just a sign that their efforts are paying off.
Does this prove that legalizing concealed carry causes violent crime rates to drop? No, because correlation does not prove causation.
That stupid article doesn't even prove correlation. Here is a graph of the homicide rate in DC since 1950. Handguns were banned in 1977 and reintroduced in 2007. Neither of those dates is significant on that graph.
How you interpret that lack of correlation, with no other supporting evidence, is more likely to be dependent on your own opinions than on anything substantial. You might say, "Look, see? Guns don't matter, so we shouldn't ban them." or, "Look, see? Banning guns in one tiny region that's surrounded by gun-permissive regions doesn't accomplish anything. So we need to ban them nation-wide." or, "Look, see? Writing an article about a single point of data is really dumb. Why are you reading the Washington Times anyway? You made that Washington/New York mistake again, didn't you? Repeat after me: the Washington Post and the New York Times are legitimate newspapers. The Washington Times and the New York Post are schlock."
I think you're reading too much into the "girlfriend experience" thing. Do you like your sex to be affectionate? Or matter-of-fact?
What they're describing in the article is considerably more involved than that.