The given amount of force was not lethal. Garner was morbidly obese and died from a heart attack in an ambulance quite some time after he was taken down to the ground. Other ways to approach the incident? Sure, he could have cooperated with the police officers instead of resisting arrest. He also could have chosen to not break the law; from what I recall he had been arrested many, many times.
For Eric Garner the amount of force clearly was lethal. And health problems are far from uncommon, particularly among people who run into trouble with the law. Given that a relatively mild amount of force cops should do everything possible to avoid applying force.
At that point in the incident Garner was arguing and waving his arms around, hardly a threat and no actual attempt had been made to restrain him. Were they "justified" in taking him down? Sure. Was it necessary? No.
Cops are expected to deal with unstable potentially violent people, de-escalation should be their first priority, but when it comes to black people the instinct often seems to be to establish their authority instead.
Police _are_ the authority! If you don't try to fight with them you won't have to worry about them harming you. Their first priority should be to protect themselves.
That thinking is the exact problem, cops shouldn't be the authority, they should represent authority. They seem to go into a lot of situations playing the alpha and automatically demanding respect and deference, this predictably pisses people off and causes a lot of situation to needlessly escalate putting both cops and the public at risk. Start from an assumption that you respect the person whom you're addressing and things probably go smoother, authority and force are only for when those things break down.
Because when you are in a public place you have no right to the expectation of privacy. If you are walking and talking down the sidewalk in town other people are able to hear your side of the conversation. Depending on if your state and the state the other party is in are two or one party states it is a moot point.
So giving this the most charitable interpretation the closest metaphor is surveillance with a good directional mike. They'd also have the suspect under constant visual surveillance to make sure they were in a public place.
This would only cover the suspect's half of the conversation though, I don't care how public the place is, unless I have the volume completely cranked I expect the voice coming out of the phone to be private. I don't think it passes the smell test with texts either though, it's pretty easy for me to conceal my screen even in a public place.
black folks have to protest that they should be able to walk around unarmed and not be viewed as a threat.
That's what their publicity message is, but almost every recent unarmed black "victim" of police shootings initiated a physical altercation with police. These protesters are really campaigning for a day when black people are free to physically attack police officers without fear of being killed, and I can say with authority that it's never going to happen. Of course, that will be taken as evidence of institutional racism.
They're actually campaigning for a day where the police practicing standard procedure don't turn encounters needlessly lethal.
Officer Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown was probably justified, but from the moment Wilson saw Brown to the moment he shot him dead there were likely many opportunities for him to make decisions that de-escalated instead of escalated.
Was it really necessary for the police to shoot Kajieme Powell for carrying a knife and shouting "Shoot me, shoot me now"? Surely there were non-lethal ways to safely resolve that situation.
Look at Eric Garner, sure it's a bit of a freak incident that the given amount of force was lethal, but if you use that level of force often enough you're going to get a lot of freak incidents. Were there other ways to approach that incident?
Cops are expected to deal with unstable potentially violent people, de-escalation should be their first priority, but when it comes to black people the instinct often seems to be to establish their authority instead.
Imagine this "protest" was being held by a bunch of black males from an inner city, how do you thing that would be recieved?
This is not an "editorial" on Uber as a service compared to traditional cab services, but rather an observation that growing government regulation (banning) of Uber (and similar services) and the liability of an almost certain stream of lawsuits will simply negate any way for services like Uber to continue.
I think that Uber-like services are here to stay. They've simply been too effective at out-competing cabs, regulation can only slow down these things for so long, the question is what the eventual market looks like.
No matter what Uber-like phone apps are going to be part of the answer, the big question is whether the drivers will be "amateurs", driving their own cars and either working full-time or just making a few bucks on the side, or if they'll be medallioned taxis with all the artificial scarcity and extra regulations entailed with that.
If phone apps are the big things that make Uber better than traditional taxis might rebound and eventually kill the ride-sharing services.
If the marginal workforce (ie part-timers, students, etc) working for cheap and following high demand is what brings the benefits then I suspect the regulations will eventually find a way to allow them, and the future cab industry will consist of multiple small players signing up with driver networks.
Either way Uber is a bit of an interesting experiment business wise. They've got a massive first mover advantage to go with some horrible PR and it seems like a bunch of that first mover advantage comes from the fact that they're willing to be assholes and simply ignore the law.
They're one of those companies where I suspect a lot of people will jump ship the moment a viable alternative is available since there's so much borderline stuff going on. I suspect Lyft or one of the other services with slightly better PR will eventually surpass them once the regulatory environment has changed and the services start hitting critical mass so the network differences aren't as apparent.
There have been many such balloon propaganda efforts - I think the religious ones are common. This is just the latest, and perhaps funniest. Don't underestimate the value of mocking the dictator - it seems petty here, but in a world where no one ever does that, it's powerful. This particular movie is pretty lame, but don't they actually kill KJU off at the end? That's a nice message there.
There's also the fact that whatever NK has been selling it's population about the west will have nothing to do with reality. The two main characters will humanize westerners, the portrayal of Kim will contradict his mystique, and the production value will hurt the effectiveness of NK productions.
It's definitely a long shot at making any positive difference, but I don't think it's a complete write-off. Media can be powerful, maybe this does provide an opportunity for some North Koreans to bond over poking fun at the leader.
We are all guilty of three felonies a day (google it), and traffic laws (not all laws) are in place to keep us safe... when appropriate.
The problem with automated speeding tickets is that, many times (i.e. no other traffic) there is no safety issue to speeding.
Sounds like another money grab for the overpaid government employee system.
The summary makes it sound like photo radar is fairly new/uncommon in the US. Is this really the case? They seem to have been everywhere in Canada for a few years.
Everybody hates a ticket and photo radar is unpopular as a result, and while there are a few instances of abuse the general arguments against them feel like rationalizations.
What happens if a dog runs into the road? What about the part where you inevitably start expanding the limits of what defines "no traffic" and "safe to speed"?
Photo radar is a cheap way to change the society default to more or less following the speed limit, this costs a bit of time but saves a lot of lives and frees up cops to either do more beneficial police work or reduce the size of the force. For once there's an aspect of law we can actually automate, that seems like a good idea.
This is quite disingenuous. The way he phrased his 'tweet' was purposeful. I personally don't care about what Tyson says or what other people think about what he says. I doubt that I am in the minority either. Even if thousands responded to him negatively (and was he that dumb that he thought that no one would? Really??) the reaction would still amount to a small minority of twitter users, which according to the company's last year numbers they had 232 million users.
Yes, it was flamebait.
Flamebait means you're trying to stir controversy and draw fire by annoying the other side. If he wrote something like On this day long ago, one of the greatest non-mythical people in history was born. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642 it would be definite flamebait. His second tweet QUESTION: This year, what do all the world's Muslims and Jews call December 25th? ANSWER: Thursday probably is a bit of flamebait, but the first tweet isn't. If anything it's a fake flamebait, "I'm going to step in this contentious issue... no I'm not!".
The problem is the religious right is embracing a culture of victimhood to compete with the left
The bigger problem is people who are responsible for representing a scientific message not being culturally sensitive to have enough tact, even if they disagree with that culture. For example the importance of teaching people the science of climate change should lead to a degree of restraint in other not very related public arenas such as holidays.
I agree that's an issue but it's not the issue here.
There's a common pattern in US media that plays out multiple times per year. Someone says something that sounds kind of objectionable, one side lines up to act as offended as they can and the other side lines up to justify the statement or defend the speaker. Eventually the speaker either doubles down or apologizes and everyone gets bored and moved on.
That's exactly what happened here, just another iteration of the Kabuki Dance of inadvertently offensive statements.
That's not to say there are legitimately offensive things said on both sides of any issue, but I don't see it here.
There's two general camps among science communicators, there's one camp that goes straight for the hard truths and controversial subjects with the idea that you fix the root cause and the rest is easy, this tends to be the Richard Dawkins camp.
The other side basically says communicate as much as you can but try to avoid offending people by being non-controversial as possible, I've always thought of that as the Neil DeGrasse Tyson camp.
The tweet here essentially a corny joke ie "huh, Tyson is writing about the birth of Jesus, I didn't think that was his thing... ohh Newton, now I get it, haha Mr. Tyson". There is nothing flamebaity or controversial about it as he intended it.
The problem is the religious right is embracing a culture of victimhood to compete with the left, attempts to reduce the degree of Jesus talk around Christmas become an attack to their right to talk Jesus, hence the "war on Christmas".
Viewed through that light the joke now becomes "Hey Jesus-folk, I'm on your side putting Jesus back in Christmas... ha ha! Just kidding, it was just Newton!"
And since they're actively looking for reasons to become offended, they become offended.
I don't think they're related, the film was almost ready to release when the hack occurred meaning they had a final or very nearly final cut.
I am a sound editor on features, I worked about 9 months at Sony this year (on Fury and 22 Jump Street mostly, not Interview). They can replace music days before the movie is released, particularly now because most shows are distributed almost exclusively on DCP. It's not unusual to printmaster the movie (finalize all the sound) and still not have all the music deals in place. Music is an independent process from the "final cut".
All of the PCs at Sony were still down in mid-December, nobody in any of the administrative departments could access any of the work they'd left on their machines or on servers prior to the hack, everybody had to lug in their Macbooks to get any work done -- Macs were unaffected by the hack. I can't imagine how they could have dotted all their i's for the delivery with one days notice and no corporate PC infrastructure.
Alright, I can buy that. I would have assumed the music got finalized earlier, but I guess you have a lot of options when it comes to the soundtrack. I suppose if nothing else works you can run it at double speed and throw in Yakety Sax.
Almost certainly this was just some production screwup. Someone at Sony thought the the license was taken care, because of that they stopped calling back and the music never got licensed.
What probably happened was the music supervisor was working on getting the clearance right up until the day of the hack, and he hasn't been able to get onto his computer since -- all of the PCs at Sony have been down ever since the Day because they're doing a huge forensic audit. And then a week went by and Sony announced they weren't going to release the movie, and the music sup just forgot about locking down the last licensing deal since it seemed like a dead letter.
And then Sony announced they were going to screen the movie with one days notice and they rushed the due-diligence.
I don't think they're related, the film was almost ready to release when the hack occurred meaning they had a final or very nearly final cut. I don't see Sony putting themselves in the position of having not-yet licensed music in the final cut, that gives the publisher far too much leverage when negotiating terms.
So, once again, if we do this we get crushed under the heel of a team of lawyers.
But a multinational like Sony does it and I bet they'll just dicker and claim some bullshit like fair use they routinely deny exists.
I sincerely hope Sony has to pay a massive fine for this... something on par with what we'd get beat down with.
They should get decently hammered though I don't think it should be crazy. The summary suggests Sony wilfully used the song despite knowing they didn't have a license, but that's a stretch based on the quote from the label
“There were initial discussions for using ‘Pay Day‘ in the movie, but at some point, the discussions ceased and we assumed that it would not follow through,” Feel Ghood Music says.
Almost certainly this was just some production screwup. Someone at Sony thought the the license was taken care, because of that they stopped calling back and the music never got licensed.
I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.
I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.
I agree. The photo on mine was completely innocuous but I'd still rather it never showed up.
Facebook seems to have forgotten the fact that they're a social network, people tend to care about the social signals they send out, and the year in review sends out a message on their behalf that they may not like.
I have my own standard for things I like to post, some random photo from my feed surrounded by tacky dancing figures isn't the kind of message I'd send out or want associated with myself. It's not a big deal, but then again not using Facebook isn't much of a big deal either. Between things like this and the feed ads I don't use Facebook as much more than an instant messaging service.
South Korea has already mentioned plans to take this film, put it on dvd, and float balloons across the border to incite rebellion in the population. By trying to prevent the movie from being distributed at all, North Korea is essentially trying to avoid anarchy caused by external propaganda.
If a bad movie can incite rebellion in your country then your country is in a terrible, terrible place.
Why are we so eager to overthrow their regime?
Why do you think making a movie was an attempt to overthrow their regime?
Is democracy so sacred that we must ~force~ it on every country around the world? What business is it of the US (and Hollywood) to decide what is the best system? What they have there is what developed in that region. It is a system that won out over the infighting to unite their country. It might not fit our definition of "fair" for the population, but that's only our definition. It's our own view that we're extending upon them, a culture that has had to isolate itself just to keep together.
If there ever was an argument for pushing democracy on a foreign country North Korea would be it. North Koreans aren't citizens, they're prisoners, they'd actually be better off living in Orwell's 1984.
Get rid of the sports that cannot measure the success of the competitors using the Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. That means no figure skating, no synchronized swimming, and, especially, no more rhythmic gymnastics. Essentially, nothing that requires assigning a number to a performance via a panel of judges. (I'm a little torn about any sport that chooses winners based on the points that they score on a particular day but when I think about the excessive coverage given to beach volleyball in the last few Summer Games I lean hard to the "drop them, too" side.)
Just think how much less expensive it would be to hold an Olympics would be if all those judged "sports" were taken out. The potential sites for the games would mushroom without a need for all the additional venues for the judged events. Cities that hold the Games can rarely afford to and the citizens wind up footing the bill for facilities that will rarely see use after the closing ceremonies. Plus, if it would get Bob Costas' interviews with prepubescent gymnasts off the air, we all win.
Considering the TV coverage those are probably some of the sports that are actually profitable (assuming you don't build a custom venue).
The events costing money are the ones you don't hear about.
China also has regularly peacefully voluntary power transfers between the conservative and liberal branches of the party every 8 years and probably quicker if a loser gets appointed.
As autocracies go they're surprisingly stable, but the average citizen doesn't have much of a voice.
Even Democracies where public opinion is critical politicians have trouble gauging what the public really wants, in an autocracy they're just guessing. China, just like every country, has a lot of widespread discontent. The difference in China is that's it's hidden because people are afraid to speak out. If something ever happens that people feel empowered to speak out then things could turn very chaotic very quickly. In healthy democracies people aren't afraid to speak out so the discontent never gets bad enough to seriously jeopardize the system.
they've slowly changed to Capitalist (Fascist).
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but I disagree regardless.
Fascist has an actual definition, it doesn't apply to capitalism and I don't think it applies to China.
And in both systems if someone is too radical such as Ron Paul, well they're shut out of the process, eg the media announce 1st, 2nd, and 4th places.
Ron Paul was shut out because his support is deep, but very narrow. The party never took him seriously because they knew his policies were too extreme to survive a general election, and the media didn't take him seriously for the same reason.
I never have understood the world's fetish with the US dollar. Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.
I'd like nothing better than to see the Rothschild's hold on international markets broken. If it takes China to do that, then all power to China in the endeavour.
Really? In under a year the ruble recently dropped in value by over half, do you really want to tie your economy to that?
As for China I think it's been fairly stable, but China is still an autocratic regime and those aren't typically stable. The US on the other hand is a large healthy democracy and I'm not aware of a single case of a country starting out as a healthy democracy and ending up as something else. Maybe the euro can eventually rival it for stability but for now you'd be a fool to bet on something else.
They break because there was no selective pressure that made them work. Cartilage doesn't regenerate because it lasted as long as we were mobile, veins don't clear plaque because that wasn't an issue with the ancestoral timeframe and lifestyle, neurons don't regrow much because they lasted long enough to keep up, our cancer defences are limited because the cell division errors generally don't go crazy until later life, etc.
There's not one root cause, each system fails because it's just not designed to keep going past that point. You can fix one system, and that might buy you a couple years if that was the thing that would kill you, but there's still dozens of others all ready to fail in their own unique ways.
Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
Yup... and its not even the worst of the bunch. I'd put Alzheimer's on the top of the list; maybe advanced Parkinson's after that. Or a bad stroke...
Yeah, I think people underestimate the difficulty of extending life.
It isn't just one thing that needs to be fixed, some immortality gene that needs to be turned on. It's everything.
Our bodies are designed to work really well for about 45 years, and decently well for another 15-20 after, but after that we're operating outside of spec.
None of our systems evolved to work after seventy, they don't all breakdown at the same rate, but they all break down.
I think we'll hit the singularity or cyborgs before we hit average humans passing 120.
Somehow I greatly resent people who profit massively from kids' math textbooks. He was such a person.
How would you prefer people to get rich?
I don't agree with the philosophy that people aren't supposed to get rich helping people, if anything those are exactly the sort of people we want to get rich.
it happened to the blameless random employees who were just using their company's email system. Because of that, they've had their most personal conversations -- gossip, medical conditions, love lives -- exposed
If you were using your company's Exchange server for gossiping and thought it was safe (i.e. the IT department would never have access to this, oh no) then you're stupid and deserve whatever fate you get.
I can sympathize with the people whose SS numbers were stolen out of no fault of their own. But Amy Pascal making Obama black jokes on company email was just stupid as hell and she deserves whatever scorn people will heap on her.
People spend a lot of time communicating with co-workers and generally become friends of some kind, it's pretty natural that they'd make jokes. And if your primary form of communication is over email it's natural you'll joke over email as well, it's not stupid as much as human nature.
And I don't see what makes the jokes offensive. Sure in the wrong context they're racist, but there's no reason to think they were using a bad context. This just feels like one of those incidents where a politician says something dumb and everyone wastes a newscycle trying to be offended by it.
Well, denmark, for example, is focused on renewables. Doesn't mean they don't want to be the ones pumping up the oil and selling it. You can do other things with oil besides burning it also. I wouldn't put it past the danes to claim it as theirs and then not pump it in the name of protecting the arctic. They just might be altruistic enough.
Sure they may delay a few years, but people tend to be a lot more altruistic when it isn't costing much. The moment I point out you're sitting on a ton of oil is the moment you start to rationalize reasons that pumping oil isn't so bad.
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Absolutely. Just don't call them Christians.
If they call themselves Christians who are you to insist otherwise?
Insisting people who don't follow a particular form of X aren't true members of the faith X is one of the primary claims used by extremists.
The given amount of force was not lethal. Garner was morbidly obese and died from a heart attack in an ambulance quite some time after he was taken down to the ground. Other ways to approach the incident? Sure, he could have cooperated with the police officers instead of resisting arrest. He also could have chosen to not break the law; from what I recall he had been arrested many, many times.
For Eric Garner the amount of force clearly was lethal. And health problems are far from uncommon, particularly among people who run into trouble with the law. Given that a relatively mild amount of force cops should do everything possible to avoid applying force.
At that point in the incident Garner was arguing and waving his arms around, hardly a threat and no actual attempt had been made to restrain him. Were they "justified" in taking him down? Sure. Was it necessary? No.
Cops are expected to deal with unstable potentially violent people, de-escalation should be their first priority, but when it comes to black people the instinct often seems to be to establish their authority instead.
Police _are_ the authority! If you don't try to fight with them you won't have to worry about them harming you. Their first priority should be to protect themselves.
That thinking is the exact problem, cops shouldn't be the authority, they should represent authority. They seem to go into a lot of situations playing the alpha and automatically demanding respect and deference, this predictably pisses people off and causes a lot of situation to needlessly escalate putting both cops and the public at risk. Start from an assumption that you respect the person whom you're addressing and things probably go smoother, authority and force are only for when those things break down.
Because when you are in a public place you have no right to the expectation of privacy. If you are walking and talking down the sidewalk in town other people are able to hear your side of the conversation. Depending on if your state and the state the other party is in are two or one party states it is a moot point.
So giving this the most charitable interpretation the closest metaphor is surveillance with a good directional mike. They'd also have the suspect under constant visual surveillance to make sure they were in a public place.
This would only cover the suspect's half of the conversation though, I don't care how public the place is, unless I have the volume completely cranked I expect the voice coming out of the phone to be private. I don't think it passes the smell test with texts either though, it's pretty easy for me to conceal my screen even in a public place.
black folks have to protest that they should be able to walk around unarmed and not be viewed as a threat.
That's what their publicity message is, but almost every recent unarmed black "victim" of police shootings initiated a physical altercation with police. These protesters are really campaigning for a day when black people are free to physically attack police officers without fear of being killed, and I can say with authority that it's never going to happen. Of course, that will be taken as evidence of institutional racism.
They're actually campaigning for a day where the police practicing standard procedure don't turn encounters needlessly lethal.
Officer Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown was probably justified, but from the moment Wilson saw Brown to the moment he shot him dead there were likely many opportunities for him to make decisions that de-escalated instead of escalated.
Was it really necessary for the police to shoot Kajieme Powell for carrying a knife and shouting "Shoot me, shoot me now"? Surely there were non-lethal ways to safely resolve that situation.
Look at Eric Garner, sure it's a bit of a freak incident that the given amount of force was lethal, but if you use that level of force often enough you're going to get a lot of freak incidents. Were there other ways to approach that incident?
Cops are expected to deal with unstable potentially violent people, de-escalation should be their first priority, but when it comes to black people the instinct often seems to be to establish their authority instead.
Imagine this "protest" was being held by a bunch of black males from an inner city, how do you thing that would be recieved?
This is not an "editorial" on Uber as a service compared to traditional cab services, but rather an observation that growing government regulation (banning) of Uber (and similar services) and the liability of an almost certain stream of lawsuits will simply negate any way for services like Uber to continue.
I think that Uber-like services are here to stay. They've simply been too effective at out-competing cabs, regulation can only slow down these things for so long, the question is what the eventual market looks like.
No matter what Uber-like phone apps are going to be part of the answer, the big question is whether the drivers will be "amateurs", driving their own cars and either working full-time or just making a few bucks on the side, or if they'll be medallioned taxis with all the artificial scarcity and extra regulations entailed with that.
If phone apps are the big things that make Uber better than traditional taxis might rebound and eventually kill the ride-sharing services.
If the marginal workforce (ie part-timers, students, etc) working for cheap and following high demand is what brings the benefits then I suspect the regulations will eventually find a way to allow them, and the future cab industry will consist of multiple small players signing up with driver networks.
Either way Uber is a bit of an interesting experiment business wise. They've got a massive first mover advantage to go with some horrible PR and it seems like a bunch of that first mover advantage comes from the fact that they're willing to be assholes and simply ignore the law.
They're one of those companies where I suspect a lot of people will jump ship the moment a viable alternative is available since there's so much borderline stuff going on. I suspect Lyft or one of the other services with slightly better PR will eventually surpass them once the regulatory environment has changed and the services start hitting critical mass so the network differences aren't as apparent.
Don't forget the hookers and blackjack.
In fact, forget the lunar base!
There have been many such balloon propaganda efforts - I think the religious ones are common. This is just the latest, and perhaps funniest. Don't underestimate the value of mocking the dictator - it seems petty here, but in a world where no one ever does that, it's powerful. This particular movie is pretty lame, but don't they actually kill KJU off at the end? That's a nice message there.
There's also the fact that whatever NK has been selling it's population about the west will have nothing to do with reality. The two main characters will humanize westerners, the portrayal of Kim will contradict his mystique, and the production value will hurt the effectiveness of NK productions.
It's definitely a long shot at making any positive difference, but I don't think it's a complete write-off. Media can be powerful, maybe this does provide an opportunity for some North Koreans to bond over poking fun at the leader.
We are all guilty of three felonies a day (google it), and traffic laws (not all laws) are in place to keep us safe... when appropriate.
The problem with automated speeding tickets is that, many times (i.e. no other traffic) there is no safety issue to speeding.
Sounds like another money grab for the overpaid government employee system.
The summary makes it sound like photo radar is fairly new/uncommon in the US. Is this really the case? They seem to have been everywhere in Canada for a few years.
Everybody hates a ticket and photo radar is unpopular as a result, and while there are a few instances of abuse the general arguments against them feel like rationalizations.
What happens if a dog runs into the road? What about the part where you inevitably start expanding the limits of what defines "no traffic" and "safe to speed"?
Photo radar is a cheap way to change the society default to more or less following the speed limit, this costs a bit of time but saves a lot of lives and frees up cops to either do more beneficial police work or reduce the size of the force. For once there's an aspect of law we can actually automate, that seems like a good idea.
Except he never intended it to be flamebait.
This is quite disingenuous. The way he phrased his 'tweet' was purposeful. I personally don't care about what Tyson says or what other people think about what he says. I doubt that I am in the minority either. Even if thousands responded to him negatively (and was he that dumb that he thought that no one would? Really??) the reaction would still amount to a small minority of twitter users, which according to the company's last year numbers they had 232 million users.
Yes, it was flamebait.
Flamebait means you're trying to stir controversy and draw fire by annoying the other side. If he wrote something like On this day long ago, one of the greatest non-mythical people in history was born. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642 it would be definite flamebait. His second tweet QUESTION: This year, what do all the world's Muslims and Jews call December 25th? ANSWER: Thursday probably is a bit of flamebait, but the first tweet isn't. If anything it's a fake flamebait, "I'm going to step in this contentious issue... no I'm not!".
The problem is the religious right is embracing a culture of victimhood to compete with the left
The bigger problem is people who are responsible for representing a scientific message not being culturally sensitive to have enough tact, even if they disagree with that culture. For example the importance of teaching people the science of climate change should lead to a degree of restraint in other not very related public arenas such as holidays.
I agree that's an issue but it's not the issue here.
There's a common pattern in US media that plays out multiple times per year. Someone says something that sounds kind of objectionable, one side lines up to act as offended as they can and the other side lines up to justify the statement or defend the speaker. Eventually the speaker either doubles down or apologizes and everyone gets bored and moved on.
That's exactly what happened here, just another iteration of the Kabuki Dance of inadvertently offensive statements.
That's not to say there are legitimately offensive things said on both sides of any issue, but I don't see it here.
Except he never intended it to be flamebait.
There's two general camps among science communicators, there's one camp that goes straight for the hard truths and controversial subjects with the idea that you fix the root cause and the rest is easy, this tends to be the Richard Dawkins camp.
The other side basically says communicate as much as you can but try to avoid offending people by being non-controversial as possible, I've always thought of that as the Neil DeGrasse Tyson camp.
The tweet here essentially a corny joke ie "huh, Tyson is writing about the birth of Jesus, I didn't think that was his thing... ohh Newton, now I get it, haha Mr. Tyson". There is nothing flamebaity or controversial about it as he intended it.
The problem is the religious right is embracing a culture of victimhood to compete with the left, attempts to reduce the degree of Jesus talk around Christmas become an attack to their right to talk Jesus, hence the "war on Christmas".
Viewed through that light the joke now becomes "Hey Jesus-folk, I'm on your side putting Jesus back in Christmas... ha ha! Just kidding, it was just Newton!"
And since they're actively looking for reasons to become offended, they become offended.
I am a sound editor on features, I worked about 9 months at Sony this year (on Fury and 22 Jump Street mostly, not Interview). They can replace music days before the movie is released, particularly now because most shows are distributed almost exclusively on DCP. It's not unusual to printmaster the movie (finalize all the sound) and still not have all the music deals in place. Music is an independent process from the "final cut".
All of the PCs at Sony were still down in mid-December, nobody in any of the administrative departments could access any of the work they'd left on their machines or on servers prior to the hack, everybody had to lug in their Macbooks to get any work done -- Macs were unaffected by the hack. I can't imagine how they could have dotted all their i's for the delivery with one days notice and no corporate PC infrastructure.
Alright, I can buy that. I would have assumed the music got finalized earlier, but I guess you have a lot of options when it comes to the soundtrack. I suppose if nothing else works you can run it at double speed and throw in Yakety Sax.
What probably happened was the music supervisor was working on getting the clearance right up until the day of the hack, and he hasn't been able to get onto his computer since -- all of the PCs at Sony have been down ever since the Day because they're doing a huge forensic audit. And then a week went by and Sony announced they weren't going to release the movie, and the music sup just forgot about locking down the last licensing deal since it seemed like a dead letter.
And then Sony announced they were going to screen the movie with one days notice and they rushed the due-diligence.
I don't think they're related, the film was almost ready to release when the hack occurred meaning they had a final or very nearly final cut. I don't see Sony putting themselves in the position of having not-yet licensed music in the final cut, that gives the publisher far too much leverage when negotiating terms.
So, once again, if we do this we get crushed under the heel of a team of lawyers.
But a multinational like Sony does it and I bet they'll just dicker and claim some bullshit like fair use they routinely deny exists.
I sincerely hope Sony has to pay a massive fine for this ... something on par with what we'd get beat down with.
They should get decently hammered though I don't think it should be crazy. The summary suggests Sony wilfully used the song despite knowing they didn't have a license, but that's a stretch based on the quote from the label
“There were initial discussions for using ‘Pay Day‘ in the movie, but at some point, the discussions ceased and we assumed that it would not follow through,” Feel Ghood Music says.
Almost certainly this was just some production screwup. Someone at Sony thought the the license was taken care, because of that they stopped calling back and the music never got licensed.
I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.
I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.
I agree. The photo on mine was completely innocuous but I'd still rather it never showed up.
Facebook seems to have forgotten the fact that they're a social network, people tend to care about the social signals they send out, and the year in review sends out a message on their behalf that they may not like.
I have my own standard for things I like to post, some random photo from my feed surrounded by tacky dancing figures isn't the kind of message I'd send out or want associated with myself. It's not a big deal, but then again not using Facebook isn't much of a big deal either. Between things like this and the feed ads I don't use Facebook as much more than an instant messaging service.
South Korea has already mentioned plans to take this film, put it on dvd, and float balloons across the border to incite rebellion in the population. By trying to prevent the movie from being distributed at all, North Korea is essentially trying to avoid anarchy caused by external propaganda.
If a bad movie can incite rebellion in your country then your country is in a terrible, terrible place.
Why are we so eager to overthrow their regime?
Why do you think making a movie was an attempt to overthrow their regime?
Is democracy so sacred that we must ~force~ it on every country around the world? What business is it of the US (and Hollywood) to decide what is the best system? What they have there is what developed in that region. It is a system that won out over the infighting to unite their country. It might not fit our definition of "fair" for the population, but that's only our definition. It's our own view that we're extending upon them, a culture that has had to isolate itself just to keep together.
If there ever was an argument for pushing democracy on a foreign country North Korea would be it. North Koreans aren't citizens, they're prisoners, they'd actually be better off living in Orwell's 1984.
Get rid of the sports that cannot measure the success of the competitors using the Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. That means no figure skating, no synchronized swimming, and, especially, no more rhythmic gymnastics. Essentially, nothing that requires assigning a number to a performance via a panel of judges. (I'm a little torn about any sport that chooses winners based on the points that they score on a particular day but when I think about the excessive coverage given to beach volleyball in the last few Summer Games I lean hard to the "drop them, too" side.)
Just think how much less expensive it would be to hold an Olympics would be if all those judged "sports" were taken out. The potential sites for the games would mushroom without a need for all the additional venues for the judged events. Cities that hold the Games can rarely afford to and the citizens wind up footing the bill for facilities that will rarely see use after the closing ceremonies. Plus, if it would get Bob Costas' interviews with prepubescent gymnasts off the air, we all win.
Considering the TV coverage those are probably some of the sports that are actually profitable (assuming you don't build a custom venue).
The events costing money are the ones you don't hear about.
China also has regularly peacefully voluntary power transfers between the conservative and liberal branches of the party every 8 years and probably quicker if a loser gets appointed.
As autocracies go they're surprisingly stable, but the average citizen doesn't have much of a voice.
Even Democracies where public opinion is critical politicians have trouble gauging what the public really wants, in an autocracy they're just guessing. China, just like every country, has a lot of widespread discontent. The difference in China is that's it's hidden because people are afraid to speak out. If something ever happens that people feel empowered to speak out then things could turn very chaotic very quickly. In healthy democracies people aren't afraid to speak out so the discontent never gets bad enough to seriously jeopardize the system.
they've slowly changed to Capitalist (Fascist).
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but I disagree regardless.
Fascist has an actual definition, it doesn't apply to capitalism and I don't think it applies to China.
And in both systems if someone is too radical such as Ron Paul, well they're shut out of the process, eg the media announce 1st, 2nd, and 4th places.
Ron Paul was shut out because his support is deep, but very narrow. The party never took him seriously because they knew his policies were too extreme to survive a general election, and the media didn't take him seriously for the same reason.
The US on the other hand is a large healthy democracy
For certain values of "healthy" that include "largely dysfunctional".
Every country has is fucked up in its own way.
But the US is part of a group of countries that have regular peaceful and voluntary power transfers.
Countries that have established that pattern tend to keep it.
I never have understood the world's fetish with the US dollar. Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.
I'd like nothing better than to see the Rothschild's hold on international markets broken. If it takes China to do that, then all power to China in the endeavour.
Really? In under a year the ruble recently dropped in value by over half, do you really want to tie your economy to that?
As for China I think it's been fairly stable, but China is still an autocratic regime and those aren't typically stable. The US on the other hand is a large healthy democracy and I'm not aware of a single case of a country starting out as a healthy democracy and ending up as something else. Maybe the euro can eventually rival it for stability but for now you'd be a fool to bet on something else.
They break because there was no selective pressure that made them work. Cartilage doesn't regenerate because it lasted as long as we were mobile, veins don't clear plaque because that wasn't an issue with the ancestoral timeframe and lifestyle, neurons don't regrow much because they lasted long enough to keep up, our cancer defences are limited because the cell division errors generally don't go crazy until later life, etc.
There's not one root cause, each system fails because it's just not designed to keep going past that point. You can fix one system, and that might buy you a couple years if that was the thing that would kill you, but there's still dozens of others all ready to fail in their own unique ways.
Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
Yup... and its not even the worst of the bunch. I'd put Alzheimer's on the top of the list; maybe advanced Parkinson's after that. Or a bad stroke...
Yeah, I think people underestimate the difficulty of extending life.
It isn't just one thing that needs to be fixed, some immortality gene that needs to be turned on. It's everything.
Our bodies are designed to work really well for about 45 years, and decently well for another 15-20 after, but after that we're operating outside of spec.
None of our systems evolved to work after seventy, they don't all breakdown at the same rate, but they all break down.
I think we'll hit the singularity or cyborgs before we hit average humans passing 120.
That's a long time to live with a tenuous connection to reality.
Somehow I greatly resent people who profit massively from kids' math textbooks. He was such a person.
How would you prefer people to get rich?
I don't agree with the philosophy that people aren't supposed to get rich helping people, if anything those are exactly the sort of people we want to get rich.
it happened to the blameless random employees who were just using their company's email system. Because of that, they've had their most personal conversations -- gossip, medical conditions, love lives -- exposed
If you were using your company's Exchange server for gossiping and thought it was safe (i.e. the IT department would never have access to this, oh no) then you're stupid and deserve whatever fate you get.
I can sympathize with the people whose SS numbers were stolen out of no fault of their own. But Amy Pascal making Obama black jokes on company email was just stupid as hell and she deserves whatever scorn people will heap on her.
People spend a lot of time communicating with co-workers and generally become friends of some kind, it's pretty natural that they'd make jokes. And if your primary form of communication is over email it's natural you'll joke over email as well, it's not stupid as much as human nature.
And I don't see what makes the jokes offensive. Sure in the wrong context they're racist, but there's no reason to think they were using a bad context. This just feels like one of those incidents where a politician says something dumb and everyone wastes a newscycle trying to be offended by it.
Well, denmark, for example, is focused on renewables. Doesn't mean they don't want to be the ones pumping up the oil and selling it. You can do other things with oil besides burning it also. I wouldn't put it past the danes to claim it as theirs and then not pump it in the name of protecting the arctic. They just might be altruistic enough.
They're not altruistic enough to leave the current oil in the ground I don't see why this oil would be different.
Sure they may delay a few years, but people tend to be a lot more altruistic when it isn't costing much. The moment I point out you're sitting on a ton of oil is the moment you start to rationalize reasons that pumping oil isn't so bad.