Go here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/... - and talk about how the worst Republian-drawn districts are so much worse than the worst Democrat-drawn district.
Both parties have been doing it for years, and every election the losers complain about gerrymandering the other party did.
Sure, from the article you just linked.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
Republicans drew Congressional boundaries in six of the 10 most-gerrymandered states.
So the Republicans are at least a little worse on the subject of gerrymandering, but I didn't just say gerrymandering, I said electioneering. The Republicans are notorious for voter suppression efforts which, when combined with gerrymandering, makes them egregious electioneers in general.
Imagine the 2 largest cities in a state had 51% of the population. Those cities could and most likely would come together and simply siphon resources from the rural areas. They can just funnel all the funding for schools, police, roads to their cities to buy local votes and ignore everyone else.
At the national level the same can be said of states. In your scenerio all the people in the red area on this map wouldn't have a voice in government at all. http://politicalmaps.org/wp-co...
Well the current system concentrates the votes of those 2 cities into a handful of districts with assured outcomes. Since the outcome of the city districts is already determined that 51% of the population has almost no voice in government at all.
Just declare that redistricting should be done by non-partisan commissions working with a well defined set of rules.
Sure there will still be biases at work, but non-partisan groups generally work well, and any subtle gerrymandering that does occur won't be sufficient to drastically swing elections.
What's really startling (not really) is the fact gerrymandering is worse in blue states than red ones, but we only ever hear (on this site) that it's all the evil republicans while the democrats are the poor victims.
You have any evidence for that not startling fact? I have no doubt that both parties do it but the Republicans have always seemed to be particularly egregious when it comes to electioneering.
The article is a little vague on exactly what happened.
A malfunction of electronic voting equipment left 5,207 votes out of the original Nov. 4 Saline County vote total, but no election outcomes were affected, according to the Saline County Clerk’s Office.
Then at the end
Outcome wasn’t affected
Merriman said that had the extra votes resulted in a change in the outcome of the election, everyone would have been notified immediately.
The problems occurred in machines at four voting locations in the following precincts: 12-13-14; 17-18-19; 20-22; and 15-16.
Votes for Sen. Pat Roberts, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Gov. Sam Brownback and Kansas Secretary of State Kobach all slightly increased.
Opposition to the jail/justice complex increased from a 953-vote difference to 1,748 votes, or from 53.95 percent to 55.08 percent.
So they evidently found the missing votes. But I'm not sure how.
Saline County Clerk Don Merriman said after the meeting that four of the 34 PEBs, or Personal Electronic Ballots, were not reading correctly on election night, which left the votes out of the original count. The problem has been fixed, he said.
He said the missing votes weren’t discovered until after votes were canvassed on Nov. 10. Merriman said he learned of the error during a “triple check” with flash cards from the PEBs.
...
The error was found the afternoon after votes were canvassed when flash card totals were compared to the printed totals.
“We always pull those flash cards and check those final totals to make sure we are OK,” he said. This is the first time we’ve had the PEBs act up like that. I’m pretty sure it is the programing in the PEBs.”
So which was missing votes? The flash cards or the printed totals? What are the printed totals? Just a summary or actual printed ballots?
If the printed totals were actual printed ballots that voters checked then I don't think there's anything to worry about.
But if there's no actual per vote record and people are just relying on the machines to correctly record the votes then I have to wonder how monumentally stupid people are to use or even create a system that insecure.
How, as a society, do we fund the creation of big budget movies that a lot of people really enjoy?
Crowdsourcing, I suppose. You pay for the movie ahead of time, and based on your investment you get to see the film, download it, get a DVD or a Blu-Ray or an M4V, get to be an extra in a crowd scene or whatever they're offering. There's no reason that major studios can't use this model. And then there's merchandising, official conventions, and lots of other opportunities for profit. I don't really think that there will be any problem getting enough people to fund some of these big-budget stinkers.
Then go for it and show that it's a viable model.
The best way to get rid of copyright is to make it unncessary. A major Creative Commons movie would go a very long way to doing that.
DRM is fairly effective, the problem is it's a massive PITA for legitimate users and prevents a lot of legitimate uses.
Actually, a grand majority of DRM is ineffective; it gets cracked almost immediately, and therefore anyone with a slight amount of knowledge can apply the cracks.
Exactly, DRM is fairly effective:P
We've never had a society like ours that did not have copyright, so we don't actually know what it would look like. You can only make baseless guesses based on how our current society operates, not a society where people are used to the idea of there being no copyright and therefore have figured out how to adapt. I don't claim to know what it would be like, either.
Not exactly but copyright hasn't always existed and in some places like China it's generally ignored.
And freedom (freedom of speech, real private property rights) is more important to me than the sort of 'safety' you speak of, anyway.
I don't think freedom of speech is really inhibited by copyright. I also wasn't aware that I spoke about 'safety' at all.
My actual solution is to let people come up with their own solutions. But yes, I'm sure many would choose to try DRM... and many would fail, since DRM is rarely effective in any sense.
DRM is fairly effective, the problem is it's a massive PITA for legitimate users and prevents a lot of legitimate uses. The fact it's a PITA combined with the fact that the warez sites tend to get shut down (and people understand they're illegal) means that people are more willing to pay for official content.
But if you remove copyright entirely then not only are the warez sites legal, but so are companies who make a business off of ripping off creators. And even for the ones who still pay creators the prices will be pushed down by the need to compete with the companies who don't pay creators.
There's still money coming in, but without the law declaring the warez sites illegitimate (even if it isn't enforced) it's only going to be a fraction of what's coming in now. I just don't think you can wave your hands and assume they'll adapt without a massive drop in the number of working artists.
I would suggest that we rely on the actual free market rather than on government-enforced monopolies that infringe upon free speech and real private property rights. It's up to individuals trying to sell something to succeed, and no one else. If they can't figure out how to make money on their product, that is simply too bad.
This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. He is not fighting for you or your right to keep a "backup copy".
I agree with you, but I also agree with his idea that information should be set free. We The People enable, protect, and to a large part even pay for the production of mass media content due to Hollywood's and Big Music's creative accounting practices which show them losing money or breaking even on clearly profitable media. And the same goes for the telecommunications infrastructure: We The People largely paid for that, not just by paying for services but actually through government grants and the like, and it's used against us to milk us of every possible cent while providing the lowest possible standard of service. The fact that we still pay more to send calls across town than to send them across the country is just ridiculous and it's based on legislation bought by the telecoms industry.
So what do you suggest as an alternative?
How, as a society, do we fund the creation of big budget movies that a lot of people really enjoy?
Those are valid questions, but the results seem to fit the generally emerging consensus that fat doesn't make you fat or do you harm. Until someone gets a counter result, that seems to be the reality.
There's also a general consensus that complex carbs and protein don't do you harm either. That would be my biggest hesitation about interpreting this study in light of weight loss advice, food is much more complex than macronutrient breakdown and obesity much more complex than diet.
Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:
1) All the participants had metabolic syndrome so the results might not be generally applicable.
2) The meals were fixed portions, so we don't know how it affected appetite or how it compared to previous eating habits.
3) We don't know what would happen long term. For instance all the participants followed the same pattern of steadily increasing carbs and decreasing fat, so it could be the body reacting to the delta.
I just mention because most people are really interested in the question "if I want to lose weight and/or reduce my risk of heart disease should I eat more/less fat and more/less carbs". But that question is incredibly specific to one person and very poorly defined beyond that. This study says in these very specific circumstances the answer is more fat and less carbs, but that's not necessarily true in general. To think it does give the general answer only sets one up for a future accusation that science is always wrong when a future study with slightly different parameters seems to reach a different conclusion.
did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
More than that. Why isn't this criminal?
I understand why you may not want to criminalize every dubious business practise, but these folks were literally telling straightforward lies to consumers to make the sale. Why isn't that fraud?
My theory is that their mind just can't take a break from analyzing things, and the rabbit hole of the conspiracy universe gives them plenty to occupy their thoughts with, it's too tempting for them to keep out of. The complex world of conspiracies is more fun and interesting than boring ol' real life, right?
I wonder if they'd still be into it if they'd found some other hobby that requires heavy logical thinking skills instead. I notice a big chunk of amateur racers are IT guys, setting up the various systems on cars offers about as much mental challenge as you want to take on.
From what I can tell they get misled by the holes in reality.
For instance with 9/11 there are things that legitimately sound weird like WTC 7 supposedly being the only highrise to collapse from fire. If that is the case I'm guessing it was just a combination of weird coincidence and the fact that massive highrise fires are extremely rare, but that's not really why those conspiracy theories pop up.
I think the root cause of 9/11 style conspiracy theories is that 9/11 was such a big event that it was documented in extreme detail. That creates a very complex story, and like any complex story there's going to be plot holes due to unlikely events or because people screwed up writing it down.
Instead some people see that a few pieces of the puzzle don't make sense and conclude the entire puzzle is a lie exposed by those ill-fitting pieces. The story they write so the puzzle fits seamlessly is a conspiracy theory.
Addendum: Now that I think of it, if I had to choose between a politician who was a coder and one who wasn't a coder with no other information, I'd vote for the non-coder. Too high a percentage of the coders I know (or know of) are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac manchildren.
I'm guessing a high percentage of the people you discuss issues with are coders.
A high percentage of people are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac (wo?)manchildren.
This happened now because the Democrats knew it would fail (if they'd thought it would succeed, they'd have pushed it BEFORE the elections just past), and wanted to get the good publicity for being AGAINST THE NSA!!!
The Republicans voted against it because the Democrats were for it.
Neither Party's position had anything to do with their opinions about the issue (they're both in favour of the status quo) - it was a purely tactical vote.
If they knew it would fail and it was just done for good PR then why wouldn't they do the vote before the election? Seems to me that good PR is kinda wasted at this point.
If I'd read anything into scheduling something as a lame-duck vote it would be that they think it's bad PR.
The City is concerned that Uber's operations pose a serious risk to the public, including those who are signing on as drivers, for the following reasons:
increased risk to passenger safety – no mechanical vehicle inspections, lack of driver training
inadequate insurance that fails to meet the requirements of the Municipal Code and may not provide essential coverage to drivers, passengers and others in the event of accidents
Seems legit. I could see the rationale for requiring a higher safety standard, and perticularly better insurance. This also seems like something Uber could accomodate.
increased number of vehicles operating as taxicabs resulting in traffic congestion and a possible threat to the taxi industry, including the City's objective of increasing the number of on-demand accessible taxicabs available, mandated by the City of Toronto earlier this year
So they want to stop Uber both because it results in too many new taxis... and because it reduces the number of Taxis? This argument sounds pretty dubious/protectionist.
unregulated fares resulting in price surging/gouging, and
Predatory pricing is a concern but for a big company like Uber it's generally something that consumers figure out.
increased safety risk to the drivers due to lack of training and vehicle security equipment, normally governed by City bylaws.
Again this is defensible and could be fixed by Uber.
It seems like Uber has an ability to seek a regulatory middle ground with some basic driver training, safety inspections, and insurance standards. I'm not sure I understand their strategy of no accomodations.
So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"
That's just bizarre to me.
However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.
'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.
I'm guessing a couple things happened.
First I don't know how obvious it is when you're doing an investigation, I wonder if a lot of people probably simply thought it was part of something else.
The second problem might be overspecialization, everyone focuses on their little section of the brain, and people aren't really doing the dissections poking at physical structures anymore. If it isn't even labelled no one even knows to look for it.
Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.
I don't use Uber, never have, never will so I have no skin in this game. But... it may not be such a far fetched idea.
Look at what happened recently with Gruber and the Obamacare fiasco. The MIT professor Gruber was being paid (and paid handsomely) by HHS... He wrote Op Eds in newspapers which were then picked up by the Obamacare supporters as independent confirmation that it was a good thing. Here was an independent MIT professor saying this was good. No where did anything cite that he was a major player in forming it nor did they say he was being paid by the administration. It was a full blown circle jerk to fool the people.
No it wasn't. Everybody knew he'd been involved in designing the law, what wasn't sufficiently disclosed is that he was still under contract to do consulting work. And even that lack of disclosure wasn't a "full blown circle jerk to fool the people" because the contract wasn't a secret so such a ploy would obviously backfire.
Most likely it was something stpuid like he got it into his head that the papers had a very different standard for conflict of interest and he didn't think non-PR consulting work qualified. Either way it's pretty offtopic.
Bring it full circle back to this article --> An article comes out against Uber and slamming the company. Well a little money and research into that "independent journalist" might just find that they're getting paid by X lobby, or Y company. Maybe their best friend is in charge of the Cabbie Union (I would imagine there is such a thing).
So go after the journalists family and children? That sounds like F.U.D. to me. But maybe check in to be sure the journalist is legit and not some shill like Gruber? Yeah... Might be time we start doing that before we all get fooled again.
#gamergate anyone?
You might be able to make that case if that's what they were talking about. Instead the quotes were talking about digging up general dirt to discredit or intimidate the reporters. That's far more difficult to defend.
Not necessarily even for gurus. At my last job my manager literally told me, unprompted, that when he saw how little I was making he was embarrassed. Why should my compensation have been so undercut by my crappy negotiating skills?
And then when I look for jobs, am I looking at all the right sites? Am aiming for the right opportunities? How long do I wait before giving an answer? There's a lot of tricks to job hunting and negotiating that don't have much to do with my actual job skills.
Why shouldn't someone like an agent work by specializing in the local job market and matching people with the best jobs. The employees make more since they've got a decent negotiator who will ensure they don't get shortchanged and the companies will do better because there will be a better match with the skillset, seems like an all around benefit.
To find out who's the youngest linux kernel developer who (to have some objective criteria) had a patch accepted into the mainstream line. Or you know, anything else besides something based on multiple choice and memorization.
Not sure when his first patch was accepted but Marcelo Tosatti became the maintainer of the 2.4 stable branch when he was 18.
If this i such a good idea then why are vanpools that have been around for decades not taking over?
They never had a Uber/Lyft userbase, particularly not one that could seemlessly transition between being a cablike service and a bus. Also note how technology can change something from impractical to easy.
A couple of vans would only cover a very few routes. Di you really think an hour or two between pickups is viable? Secondly it would completely shed Uber's fatasy of "ride share". Being picked up by a company owned vehicle with a company paid driver is no no way "ride sharing". Therefore Uber would have to comply with the same rules as taxis. It also adds employees to Uber and employees are expensive.
Why would it be an hour or two? If it's not being "carpooled" it's just a regular Uber vehicle in a high volume area. As for the employee cost Uber effectively has employees driving the cars now, the pay mechanism is just a bit different.
Sorry but company owned, company driven buses on semi-set routes is very different than a dispatch service which is what they are right now.
But it doesn't start on semi-set routes. It just sits in a high volume area. The route is set by the people who order it, only if it gets really big would you consider semi-set routes. You could even do it for current Uber drivers, guy owns a van, signs up to offer carpooling. Partway through the trip he gets an alert, asks the passengers if they'd accept a $10 discount for a 5 minute detour and a couple extra fares. Is that really a huge departure from what they're doing now?
it's something the system described in the article could grow into organically
Things grow when there is an excess. For quite a while a service like this will be bleeding money. If you don't have enough money to get over that initial loss period the the service dies.
But they don't have to start with buses. Uber buys a couple of their own vans (they got tons of cash) and hires fulltime drivers for some of their high volume routes. They then add a carpool option that people can select where if they do end up sharing they'll get a cheaper price at the cost of a slightly longer commute. If it gets popular they can start adding more/bigger vehicles in those regions.
It's viable from the start and the start state isn't much different from what they're doing now.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Aren't you a little black to be a stormtrooper?
This seems like canon, I thought all the stormtroopers were clones of Jango Fett.
That's because you listen to the media. You only hear and believe one side of the story.
And you believe the other side because you're listening to different media/blogs.
Which is why I asked for evidence.
Go here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/... - and talk about how the worst Republian-drawn districts are so much worse than the worst Democrat-drawn district.
Both parties have been doing it for years, and every election the losers complain about gerrymandering the other party did.
Sure, from the article you just linked.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
Republicans drew Congressional boundaries in six of the 10 most-gerrymandered states.
So the Republicans are at least a little worse on the subject of gerrymandering, but I didn't just say gerrymandering, I said electioneering. The Republicans are notorious for voter suppression efforts which, when combined with gerrymandering, makes them egregious electioneers in general.
Imagine the 2 largest cities in a state had 51% of the population. Those cities could and most likely would come together and simply siphon resources from the rural areas. They can just funnel all the funding for schools, police, roads to their cities to buy local votes and ignore everyone else.
At the national level the same can be said of states. In your scenerio all the people in the red area on this map wouldn't have a voice in government at all.
http://politicalmaps.org/wp-co...
Well the current system concentrates the votes of those 2 cities into a handful of districts with assured outcomes. Since the outcome of the city districts is already determined that 51% of the population has almost no voice in government at all.
This isn't a software problem.
Just declare that redistricting should be done by non-partisan commissions working with a well defined set of rules.
Sure there will still be biases at work, but non-partisan groups generally work well, and any subtle gerrymandering that does occur won't be sufficient to drastically swing elections.
What's really startling (not really) is the fact gerrymandering is worse in blue states than red ones, but we only ever hear (on this site) that it's all the evil republicans while the democrats are the poor victims.
You have any evidence for that not startling fact? I have no doubt that both parties do it but the Republicans have always seemed to be particularly egregious when it comes to electioneering.
The article is a little vague on exactly what happened.
A malfunction of electronic voting equipment left 5,207 votes out of the original Nov. 4 Saline County vote total, but no election outcomes were affected, according to the Saline County Clerk’s Office.
Then at the end
Outcome wasn’t affected
Merriman said that had the extra votes resulted in a change in the outcome of the election, everyone would have been notified immediately.
The problems occurred in machines at four voting locations in the following precincts: 12-13-14; 17-18-19; 20-22; and 15-16.
Votes for Sen. Pat Roberts, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Gov. Sam Brownback and Kansas Secretary of State Kobach all slightly increased.
Opposition to the jail/justice complex increased from a 953-vote difference to 1,748 votes, or from 53.95 percent to 55.08 percent.
So they evidently found the missing votes. But I'm not sure how.
Saline County Clerk Don Merriman said after the meeting that four of the 34 PEBs, or Personal Electronic Ballots, were not reading correctly on election night, which left the votes out of the original count. The problem has been fixed, he said.
He said the missing votes weren’t discovered until after votes were canvassed on Nov. 10. Merriman said he learned of the error during a “triple check” with flash cards from the PEBs.
...
The error was found the afternoon after votes were canvassed when flash card totals were compared to the printed totals.
“We always pull those flash cards and check those final totals to make sure we are OK,” he said. This is the first time we’ve had the PEBs act up like that. I’m pretty sure it is the programing in the PEBs.”
So which was missing votes? The flash cards or the printed totals? What are the printed totals? Just a summary or actual printed ballots?
If the printed totals were actual printed ballots that voters checked then I don't think there's anything to worry about.
But if there's no actual per vote record and people are just relying on the machines to correctly record the votes then I have to wonder how monumentally stupid people are to use or even create a system that insecure.
How, as a society, do we fund the creation of big budget movies that a lot of people really enjoy?
Crowdsourcing, I suppose. You pay for the movie ahead of time, and based on your investment you get to see the film, download it, get a DVD or a Blu-Ray or an M4V, get to be an extra in a crowd scene or whatever they're offering. There's no reason that major studios can't use this model. And then there's merchandising, official conventions, and lots of other opportunities for profit. I don't really think that there will be any problem getting enough people to fund some of these big-budget stinkers.
Then go for it and show that it's a viable model.
The best way to get rid of copyright is to make it unncessary. A major Creative Commons movie would go a very long way to doing that.
DRM is fairly effective, the problem is it's a massive PITA for legitimate users and prevents a lot of legitimate uses.
Actually, a grand majority of DRM is ineffective; it gets cracked almost immediately, and therefore anyone with a slight amount of knowledge can apply the cracks.
Exactly, DRM is fairly effective :P
We've never had a society like ours that did not have copyright, so we don't actually know what it would look like. You can only make baseless guesses based on how our current society operates, not a society where people are used to the idea of there being no copyright and therefore have figured out how to adapt. I don't claim to know what it would be like, either.
Not exactly but copyright hasn't always existed and in some places like China it's generally ignored.
And freedom (freedom of speech, real private property rights) is more important to me than the sort of 'safety' you speak of, anyway.
I don't think freedom of speech is really inhibited by copyright. I also wasn't aware that I spoke about 'safety' at all.
My actual solution is to let people come up with their own solutions. But yes, I'm sure many would choose to try DRM... and many would fail, since DRM is rarely effective in any sense.
DRM is fairly effective, the problem is it's a massive PITA for legitimate users and prevents a lot of legitimate uses. The fact it's a PITA combined with the fact that the warez sites tend to get shut down (and people understand they're illegal) means that people are more willing to pay for official content.
But if you remove copyright entirely then not only are the warez sites legal, but so are companies who make a business off of ripping off creators. And even for the ones who still pay creators the prices will be pushed down by the need to compete with the companies who don't pay creators.
There's still money coming in, but without the law declaring the warez sites illegitimate (even if it isn't enforced) it's only going to be a fraction of what's coming in now. I just don't think you can wave your hands and assume they'll adapt without a massive drop in the number of working artists.
I would suggest that we rely on the actual free market rather than on government-enforced monopolies that infringe upon free speech and real private property rights. It's up to individuals trying to sell something to succeed, and no one else. If they can't figure out how to make money on their product, that is simply too bad.
So your solution is DRM.
This is nothing but yet another one of his charades and PR stunts. He is not fighting for you or your right to keep a "backup copy".
I agree with you, but I also agree with his idea that information should be set free. We The People enable, protect, and to a large part even pay for the production of mass media content due to Hollywood's and Big Music's creative accounting practices which show them losing money or breaking even on clearly profitable media. And the same goes for the telecommunications infrastructure: We The People largely paid for that, not just by paying for services but actually through government grants and the like, and it's used against us to milk us of every possible cent while providing the lowest possible standard of service. The fact that we still pay more to send calls across town than to send them across the country is just ridiculous and it's based on legislation bought by the telecoms industry.
So what do you suggest as an alternative?
How, as a society, do we fund the creation of big budget movies that a lot of people really enjoy?
Those are valid questions, but the results seem to fit the generally emerging consensus that fat doesn't make you fat or do you harm. Until someone gets a counter result, that seems to be the reality.
There's also a general consensus that complex carbs and protein don't do you harm either. That would be my biggest hesitation about interpreting this study in light of weight loss advice, food is much more complex than macronutrient breakdown and obesity much more complex than diet.
Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:
1) All the participants had metabolic syndrome so the results might not be generally applicable.
2) The meals were fixed portions, so we don't know how it affected appetite or how it compared to previous eating habits.
3) We don't know what would happen long term. For instance all the participants followed the same pattern of steadily increasing carbs and decreasing fat, so it could be the body reacting to the delta.
I just mention because most people are really interested in the question "if I want to lose weight and/or reduce my risk of heart disease should I eat more/less fat and more/less carbs". But that question is incredibly specific to one person and very poorly defined beyond that. This study says in these very specific circumstances the answer is more fat and less carbs, but that's not necessarily true in general. To think it does give the general answer only sets one up for a future accusation that science is always wrong when a future study with slightly different parameters seems to reach a different conclusion.
did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
More than that. Why isn't this criminal?
I understand why you may not want to criminalize every dubious business practise, but these folks were literally telling straightforward lies to consumers to make the sale. Why isn't that fraud?
My theory is that their mind just can't take a break from analyzing things, and the rabbit hole of the conspiracy universe gives them plenty to occupy their thoughts with, it's too tempting for them to keep out of. The complex world of conspiracies is more fun and interesting than boring ol' real life, right?
I wonder if they'd still be into it if they'd found some other hobby that requires heavy logical thinking skills instead. I notice a big chunk of amateur racers are IT guys, setting up the various systems on cars offers about as much mental challenge as you want to take on.
From what I can tell they get misled by the holes in reality.
For instance with 9/11 there are things that legitimately sound weird like WTC 7 supposedly being the only highrise to collapse from fire. If that is the case I'm guessing it was just a combination of weird coincidence and the fact that massive highrise fires are extremely rare, but that's not really why those conspiracy theories pop up.
I think the root cause of 9/11 style conspiracy theories is that 9/11 was such a big event that it was documented in extreme detail. That creates a very complex story, and like any complex story there's going to be plot holes due to unlikely events or because people screwed up writing it down.
Instead some people see that a few pieces of the puzzle don't make sense and conclude the entire puzzle is a lie exposed by those ill-fitting pieces. The story they write so the puzzle fits seamlessly is a conspiracy theory.
Addendum: Now that I think of it, if I had to choose between a politician who was a coder and one who wasn't a coder with no other information, I'd vote for the non-coder. Too high a percentage of the coders I know (or know of) are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac manchildren.
I'm guessing a high percentage of the people you discuss issues with are coders.
A high percentage of people are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac (wo?)manchildren.
This happened now because the Democrats knew it would fail (if they'd thought it would succeed, they'd have pushed it BEFORE the elections just past), and wanted to get the good publicity for being AGAINST THE NSA!!!
The Republicans voted against it because the Democrats were for it.
Neither Party's position had anything to do with their opinions about the issue (they're both in favour of the status quo) - it was a purely tactical vote.
If they knew it would fail and it was just done for good PR then why wouldn't they do the vote before the election? Seems to me that good PR is kinda wasted at this point.
If I'd read anything into scheduling something as a lame-duck vote it would be that they think it's bad PR.
The City is concerned that Uber's operations pose a serious risk to the public, including those who are signing on as drivers, for the following reasons:
increased risk to passenger safety – no mechanical vehicle inspections, lack of driver training
inadequate insurance that fails to meet the requirements of the Municipal Code and may not provide essential coverage to drivers, passengers and others in the event of accidents
Seems legit. I could see the rationale for requiring a higher safety standard, and perticularly better insurance. This also seems like something Uber could accomodate.
increased number of vehicles operating as taxicabs resulting in traffic congestion and a possible threat to the taxi industry, including the City's objective of increasing the number of on-demand accessible taxicabs available, mandated by the City of Toronto earlier this year
So they want to stop Uber both because it results in too many new taxis... and because it reduces the number of Taxis? This argument sounds pretty dubious/protectionist.
unregulated fares resulting in price surging/gouging, and
Predatory pricing is a concern but for a big company like Uber it's generally something that consumers figure out.
increased safety risk to the drivers due to lack of training and vehicle security equipment, normally governed by City bylaws.
Again this is defensible and could be fixed by Uber.
It seems like Uber has an ability to seek a regulatory middle ground with some basic driver training, safety inspections, and insurance standards. I'm not sure I understand their strategy of no accomodations.
So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things ... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"
That's just bizarre to me.
However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.
'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.
I'm guessing a couple things happened.
First I don't know how obvious it is when you're doing an investigation, I wonder if a lot of people probably simply thought it was part of something else.
The second problem might be overspecialization, everyone focuses on their little section of the brain, and people aren't really doing the dissections poking at physical structures anymore. If it isn't even labelled no one even knows to look for it.
Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.
I don't use Uber, never have, never will so I have no skin in this game. But... it may not be such a far fetched idea.
Look at what happened recently with Gruber and the Obamacare fiasco. The MIT professor Gruber was being paid (and paid handsomely) by HHS... He wrote Op Eds in newspapers which were then picked up by the Obamacare supporters as independent confirmation that it was a good thing. Here was an independent MIT professor saying this was good. No where did anything cite that he was a major player in forming it nor did they say he was being paid by the administration. It was a full blown circle jerk to fool the people.
No it wasn't. Everybody knew he'd been involved in designing the law, what wasn't sufficiently disclosed is that he was still under contract to do consulting work. And even that lack of disclosure wasn't a "full blown circle jerk to fool the people" because the contract wasn't a secret so such a ploy would obviously backfire.
Most likely it was something stpuid like he got it into his head that the papers had a very different standard for conflict of interest and he didn't think non-PR consulting work qualified. Either way it's pretty offtopic.
Bring it full circle back to this article --> An article comes out against Uber and slamming the company. Well a little money and research into that "independent journalist" might just find that they're getting paid by X lobby, or Y company. Maybe their best friend is in charge of the Cabbie Union (I would imagine there is such a thing).
So go after the journalists family and children? That sounds like F.U.D. to me. But maybe check in to be sure the journalist is legit and not some shill like Gruber? Yeah... Might be time we start doing that before we all get fooled again.
#gamergate anyone?
You might be able to make that case if that's what they were talking about. Instead the quotes were talking about digging up general dirt to discredit or intimidate the reporters. That's far more difficult to defend.
Not necessarily even for gurus. At my last job my manager literally told me, unprompted, that when he saw how little I was making he was embarrassed. Why should my compensation have been so undercut by my crappy negotiating skills?
And then when I look for jobs, am I looking at all the right sites? Am aiming for the right opportunities? How long do I wait before giving an answer? There's a lot of tricks to job hunting and negotiating that don't have much to do with my actual job skills.
Why shouldn't someone like an agent work by specializing in the local job market and matching people with the best jobs. The employees make more since they've got a decent negotiator who will ensure they don't get shortchanged and the companies will do better because there will be a better match with the skillset, seems like an all around benefit.
To find out who's the youngest linux kernel developer who (to have some objective criteria) had a patch accepted into the mainstream line.
Or you know, anything else besides something based on multiple choice and memorization.
Not sure when his first patch was accepted but Marcelo Tosatti became the maintainer of the 2.4 stable branch when he was 18.
If this i such a good idea then why are vanpools that have been around for decades not taking over?
They never had a Uber/Lyft userbase, particularly not one that could seemlessly transition between being a cablike service and a bus. Also note how technology can change something from impractical to easy.
A couple of vans would only cover a very few routes. Di you really think an hour or two between pickups is viable? Secondly it would completely shed Uber's fatasy of "ride share". Being picked up by a company owned vehicle with a company paid driver is no no way "ride sharing". Therefore Uber would have to comply with the same rules as taxis. It also adds employees to Uber and employees are expensive.
Why would it be an hour or two? If it's not being "carpooled" it's just a regular Uber vehicle in a high volume area. As for the employee cost Uber effectively has employees driving the cars now, the pay mechanism is just a bit different.
Sorry but company owned, company driven buses on semi-set routes is very different than a dispatch service which is what they are right now.
But it doesn't start on semi-set routes. It just sits in a high volume area. The route is set by the people who order it, only if it gets really big would you consider semi-set routes. You could even do it for current Uber drivers, guy owns a van, signs up to offer carpooling. Partway through the trip he gets an alert, asks the passengers if they'd accept a $10 discount for a 5 minute detour and a couple extra fares. Is that really a huge departure from what they're doing now?
it's something the system described in the article could grow into organically
Things grow when there is an excess. For quite a while a service like this will be bleeding money. If you don't have enough money to get over that initial loss period the the service dies.
But they don't have to start with buses. Uber buys a couple of their own vans (they got tons of cash) and hires fulltime drivers for some of their high volume routes. They then add a carpool option that people can select where if they do end up sharing they'll get a cheaper price at the cost of a slightly longer commute. If it gets popular they can start adding more/bigger vehicles in those regions.
It's viable from the start and the start state isn't much different from what they're doing now.