Yes, a fair bit of it is spin, misinformation and gaslighting, and the US clearly got Ecuador to come over to it's side on the matter. I have no illusions about my own country. Initially, the US was doing everything in it's power to screw with him from any angle that it could, then for a few years they were content to keep him bottled up, but eventually decided to end the game and bring him in.
That being said, there's been enough coverage get a clear picture of him beyond the hype - he's a controlling megalomaniac who thought that he could hold his own playing power-geo-politics in the same arena as the US and Russia. The man thought that he could go toe-to-toe with a frikkin superpower. Talk about delusions of grandeur.
Wikileaks was a noble idea at the very start but it quickly got corrupted, and Assange himself is mostly to blame. If you're going to run a clean free-information clearinghouse, then you treat all submitted information the same and release it all in the same matter. Assange wasn't doing this. He was releasing some info, holding other info back, and timing the releases in order to settle scores and make points with whomever he chose. Sorry, you don't get to do that and simultaneously claim victimhood or nobility. Well, you can, but anyone with (IQ>90) isn't gonna buy it.
Yup. Political attitudes have changed and there's very little idealogical consistency any more. If the dems propose it, Republicans and conservatives will fight it to the death, and vice versa for the most part.
Nothing exemplifies this more than Obamacare. Obamacare is an attempt to use the power of free markets and capitalism to solve a social problem. It's the sort of idea that Republicans and conservatives would have been salivating over 20 years ago. But now? Put in place by a dem president, and a brown-skinned one at that? Clearly a herald of the coming of the antichrist.
Yeah, it's a really weird place, with some absolutely idiotic things. Interestingly, the same attitudes that give us that dumb stuff also give us the best (arguably) overall economy in the world, the strongest military by far, and top.place in most research and engineering fields. It's a mixed bag. Not for everyone.
People still blaming the cops on this one. Get a clue, please. This is the US. Guns outnumber people. It's just a cold, hard fact: US cops have to deal with a population that's swimming in guns, and it's their responsibility to somehow keep the "peace" So they assume that pretty much everyone they encounter is packing, which means they're going to escalate to gunfire very, very quickly in response to anything outside of "normal, quite street scene".
Cops are like this because of the choices we've made as a civilization about guns. We engineered this situation. I'm not making value judgments - just pointing out that the trade-off is absolutely clear. We really, really, really, really want free ownership of guns. But freedom isn't free - the cost is a high murder rate, school shootings and swat events gone bad. And it's obvious to me that we're generally ok with this tradeoff as a group. When gun violence makes the news, 20% of the population wrings their hands, 20% of the population goes out and buys more guns, and 60% shrugs their shoulders. After 72 hours everyone forgets about it. The dead get buried, maybe someone goes to prison, insurance companies write a few checks, more guns go into circulation, and everyone hangs around till the next event. We could have gotten rid of the guns decades ago if we really wanted to.
Oh, and here's a message to any NRA type who comes back with "guns don't cause increased violence" or "guns make schools safer" or any variant of that: shut the f*** up, grow a pair, and admit that your favorite toy comes with a blood price. No, your family is NOT safer cause you have a gun in the nightstand. Yes, school shootings are DEFINITELY linked to easy gun availability. Yes, our sky high murder rate is BECAUSE of guns. For Gods sake, just own up to the price we pay instead of hiding behind something that Charleton Heston spewed in support of a gun industry lobby. You'll get a ton more respect from me.
The swatter orchestrated an incredibly dangerous situation and is the one to blame for this. For what's basically a murder (not first degree) 20 years seems reasonable. He's not in for life, but he'll be in a cage long enough that his testosterone levels will be way lower when he gets out. He probably won't be a threat by then.
Yes, very impressive. 4% of the population signed an online petition. Bow before the power of the people!
Except an internet poll counts for very, very little. Try making your voice heard when it *really* matters. Like, say.... maybe in an election? If I recall, about 51% of the people who actually count (aka the ones that bother to vote) went for the collective temper-tantrum that is Brexit. It would take another referendum to stop it.
The world is in some sort of retrenching phase right now. Far left and right wings on the rise, anger breaking out everywhere, treaties and alliances crumbling. Crap leaders taking power or getting elected all over the world and voters seem alright with it. It's not for lack of good candidates. It's just that most leaders who dare to be reasonable get rapidly replaced by autocrats or demagogues who are shouting the most extreme stuff at the most extreme volume. I'm not sure what's going on. It's not limited to any country or region, so it must be something emergent in the whole population. Brexit is a small part of a much larger human trend.
We'll snap out of this eventually, but no country is gonna move forward for the next decade or two. I suspect that whatever country manages to backtrack the least will be the one that winds up on top. My money is on the U.S. or Europe.
While it's clear that some com companies are using dirty tricks to keep small players out of the game, smoothing this out isn't gonna magically grow fiber to the whole US. The US is a fairly large landmass. My understanding is that most countries with really good internet connection everywhere are pretty small in comparison. As in "equivalent to one or two US states" kind of small.
Someone prove me wrong? I'd love to see better net access here but we have LOTS of rural farmland.
All due respect to the grandson and the grandfather, but Theo Brown was a businessman of the time. If he had lived today, he would totally be working to lock his customers into exclusive maintenance channels. Business has changed, and that's how you make money nowadays. I like the idea of right-to-repair, but let's face it: it just isn't good business anymore. You're fighting capitalism. It's gonna be a *very* uphill battle.
Oof. Maybe just a tad harsh on the US? It's not exactly the shining beacon of white nobility that nationalists like to claim. But wow. Talk about vassal states first. The US has some imperialist tendencies but they're quite mild compared to other empires, both current and in the past. If you think being aligned with the U.S. is a vassal situation, try being under the thumb of China or Russia for a while, or Iran, or Britain about 150 years ago. Similar arguments for telecom equipment. Use US gear and the US will listen in. That's been shown. Use Chinese gear and the Chinese government will listen. 100% quaranteed. Use European equipment and.... well those governments are less likely to spy, but the gear will be billions more and years late. Not great choices, but.... well, we live in the real world. Pick your poison.
I've said this before, and for some reason tons of people take offense at this idea, but the only solution that I can see is to charge for communication. What I want is a cell phone number and an email that's linked to a bank account. You want to call, text or email me? It's gonna cost you about 5 cents, per communication. Money into my account. Up front. You want to talk to me, you gotta have a real identity, a real bank account in a reputable country and the ability and will to transfer a token amount of money to me.
Nobody who counts will balk at 5 pennies but no scammer or spammer is gonna cough up that much per person. It will shut their business model down cold. Overnight. My phone will stop ringing off the hook with trash calls and my email won't need a spam filter. My friends, colleagues and I will have cleaner lines of communication. Everyone who matters at all wins.
I understand that this would be a 2-way street. I'm willing to pay similar to send things to others. I wouldn't be making money at this.
It's always been like this. There were always bad sources of information out there. The targets have ALWAYS been the people with low intelligence, the people with brain chemical imbalances, the willfully-ignorant and the actually-ignorant. I was born in the 1970s, and there were ALWAYS conspiracy theories being thrown around. You think they were invented yesterday? The internet has just amplified the effect by 100.
You know that a news source is trustworthy when the people generating the news are named. The reporters, writers, and editors have actual names, and actual credentials. Where the people involved have actual journalistic credentials, and their source of income is transparent, and they have an explicit, written code of conduct that emphasizes factuality, and any bias is explicitly stated up front. Translation: a transparent, subscription-based news source.
She refuses to testify because she doesn't like the secrecy. But then she claims that she's already revealed everything there is to say. And somehow twists this into some sort of idealogical battle? This is a *very* fuzzy headed individual. Sigh. I guess that it's pretty common across the board. Humanity has put rationality in the back seat for the time being.
She won't win this fight unless she's ready to sit out the jail sentence. When a grand jury pulls you up and says "talk" you don't get a say in the matter, unless you're ready to plead the 5th or sit in a jail cell.
Yeah, I wouldn't believe this guy is dead unless I saw the body, took a tissue sample myself and verified the DNA. A body alone wouldn't be enough, and a smudge of DNA sans body wouldn't be enough either.
One possibility is that he stole it, spent/gambled/lost it, committed suicide and then tried to make his death look like a non-suicide for societal or insurance reasons. The other possibility is that he's alive and well living off 100+ million bucks somewhere. Maybe he was trying to do this but got killed by some criminal element in India. We'll probably know the whole story eventually. Once competent investigators start to trace the money, they can find virtually anything, anywhere.
I like the way things are right now. It's a good balance. There's secure encryption out there that's *very* hard for the government to break. If someone wants to use that stuff, they can, but it takes motivation. Apple products don't cut it - those are easy to break. You need pgp and stuff like that. If the government wants access to strongly-encrypted data, they have to get a subpoena. It's not easy. Two separate branches of the government (executive and judicial) have to agree that there's a legit reason. If the government meets that high bar, then they have rights to it. At that point, the person can either a) unlock the info or b) head to jail.
Some people in government feel that they should be able to poke into whatever, whenever, wherever they want. If we give these people control, we'll end up like China. No thanks. I like my western democracy. The executive branch+NSA has overstepped these bounds in the past and I don't approve at all. Suck it up, spooks! Spend the time, fill out the paperwork and get your frikkin subpeonas approved by a judge. Every. Single. Time. It's designed to be hard on purpose.
Some people on the other side feel that they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. Laws be damned. Some of these people call themselves libertarians, some call themselves anarchists, some are truly criminals, but a lot of them just don't like being told what to do. These people need to get a clue. If you want to live like that, find an uninhabited spot and live as a hermit. Rural Australia, Siberia and the Arctic are good candidates. You won't last long, but you'll be free according to your own terms. The second you want to live in a group with other people (aka a civilization) there are rules to follow.
Once Musk got into hot water with the SEC, he should have turned all his social media posting over to a small group of professional outreach people with a lawyer on the team. Why he kept control of it himself is a mystery to me. You do NOT screw with an SEC order like that. Ouch, what a dumb lesson for a very intelligent person to have to learn the hard way.
Kind of reminds me of the Roger Stone situation. This is a VERY media-savvy guy. For some reason, he thought that he could get away with posting physically threatening imagery aimed at a federal judge, and violate a gag order at the same time. But this is frikkin federal judge we're talking about. Forget about "I'm famous in the tabloids and slightly rich".... federal judges have REAL power. What was he thinking?'
Same thing goes for people like Trump and Manafort, thinking that they can somehow get around Mueller with a little bit of politicking and misdirection.
Come on, people. Learn to identify the real heavyweights or get squashed.
This is a modification of a previous post. It's all well and good for researchers to think about climate change. To me, it's pretty clear that climate science has the general picture right, even if individual models are all imperfect.
However, I doubt anything serious will be done until it becomes a *real* and *immediate* problem that's undeniable to *most* of the planet. In the past, humanity was able to do things proactively, like agree to limit fluorocarbons to fix the hole we punched in our ozone layer. Unfortunately, forward-thinking and cooperation is mostly dead, at least for the time being. Humanity is currently engaged in a full-blown session of head-up-ass (on multiple issues, not just climate change) and the bar for action in this area is very, very high.
A slight rise in temperature isn't real enough.
A slight increase in storm severity isn't enough.
The loss of one or two major breadbasket regions isn't enough. Food production will just shift around.
Anything that happens in a poor country isn't enough, including starvation. Poor people simply don't count enough to those with power and wealth.
Any effect that is limited to the coasts isn't enough. People will just move.
Any extinctions short of country-scale ecological collapse isn't enough. Most people don't care about plants and critters beyond eating them.
Anything that is limited to the arctic isn't enough. Nobody lives there.
Mass migrations from poor countries won't be enough. Rich countries will just put up barriers and allow populations to die.
Actually, humanity is starting to de-carbonize, but incrementally and not for ecological reasons. Renewables are slowly becoming more economically competitive than carbon-based energy. Will it happen before we change the planet in ways that impede our progress as a species? The jury is still out on that one.
As far as I can see, here are the only things that will force humanity to deal with the problem at a faster pace:
Environmental-related destruction that renders entire cities in the rich world uninhabitable. That level of economic damage won't be deniable.
Loss of enough major food-producing regions to affect the dinner tables of people in the rich world. When steak becomes unavailable, it'll be serious.
Beyond that, it's business as usual. Let's hope that geo-engineering is a viable option, because I suspect that we're going to need it.
Yes, immediate timeliness can be a factor. If you need it *now* and only one company can deliver it *now* then, yes, market forces can be overridden. So, you're right. If MS is currently the only vendor then perhaps the employees can make headway in setting policy. But, only if key employees back up the letter with a willingness to walk.
And only temporarily. >99% of the time the drive for profit eventually overrides everything. Given a few more years, another company could fill the need. Computer vision is advanced, but not all that advanced anymore. It's gone beyond the stage of "a few nobel-level people understand it".
I can't recall a single instance where employee activism actually had a significant effect on the activities/impacts of a for-profit company. I've seen tons of examples where the company just appoints some sort of insert-ethical-concern-here-compliance-officer and gives them some level of illusory authority to enforce ethics. And business goes on. It's window dressing, and the questionable activity just gets buried somewhere in the business that has less public exposure.
This doesn't mean I'm some sort of free market extremist. The effective way to control what companies can and can't do is through laws or regulation. Of course, the U.S. isn't going to prevent its companies from working with the DOD. So, back to my original statement. If I don't want to work on weapons, I find a company that doesn't develop weaponry and I work for them. Trying to change a company that's already taken on DOD contracts is most likely a fools errand.
Profit. It's the only reason that for-profit companies exist. They make money, or they die. If a company passes up an opportunity to make money, another company will step in. That's capitalism, baby! It's got tons of advantages, but cutthroat cold-heartedness is a downside to the system, and there isn't really any way around it. The Microsoft employees signing this petition have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that they work for a non-profit. They don't, and they don't get much of a say in company policy. Their only real option is to vote with their feet. That's how our system works. A few of my friends refused jobs because they didn't want to design/research/construct weapons. They found something else that suited them better. That's how you express your displeasure with an employer. Everything else is noise.
Heh. Heh. Heheheh. HAHAHAHAHA. That's MIGHTY progressive of them. They're TOTALLY fine with renewables. In 2040, AFTER peak oil, AFTER they've drilled most of the easy oil out of the ground and sold it to be burned and dumped into the atmosphere. After that, they're ALL FINE with the world getting behind renewables.
I guess at that point we can load up our electric vehicles as we mass-migrate out of the collapsed ecosystems that we've caused. Niiiice.
They've never been anywhere near a western democracy, but you're wrong that there was zero progress. Specifically, Deng (previous Chinese leader) had been encouraging small experiments in various kinds of democracy within China. Local-level government type of stuff to see if it would destablilize the society. They were doing it quietly but it was happening. They were experimenting with allowing higher levels of civic society to co-exist with the communist party. Their citizens were getting pulled out of poverty, getting at least a little internet access, getting more freedom to move and pick jobs, etc. etc. There was real debate within the Communist party as to how far to allow that stuff to progress.
Xi pulled the plug on a lot of it. Back to Emperor-style politics. Oh well. China will be less adaptable, less innovative and eventually weaker as a result, though the effects will take decades to manifest. Ultimately, the result will be one less country to seriously contend with the U.S. for dominance.
Up until fairly recently, the strategy worked. We allowed them into the world of modern trade and commerce and bought their stuff. Overall, the country became more open and more modern. The strategy helped to pull about half a billion people out of poverty. Yes, we had to tolerate a highly flawed Chinese government with a bad human rights record and a lot of dodgy Chinese business practices, but nothing worse than we've tolerated from a dozen other countries we regularly do business with. Overall, the benefits were enormous.
Then something changed. China started backsliding. The most obvious symptom of this is Xi Jingping, who has actively pulled the country back towards autocracy, but there's a long list of things that suggest our "do business with them and they'll improve" strategy isn't working any more. A lot of foreign policy types are concluding that a change is needed. I've read that even most pro-Chinese economists in the West have concluded that China is sliding backwards. The carrot isn't working any more, so governments are trying a bit of stick instead. They're not going to have much luck expanding their overseas businesses for the next decade or two.
I'm not sure "saving on fees" was the real motivation here. Tax avoidance sounds a lot more likely. In any case, ouch. Note to all 30 year olds: just because you're smart in one area doesn't mean you're master of all. Be careful. What you don't know CAN hurt you. Hard lesson to learn but I'm not sure which lesson is relevant here.
If the guy was just trying to save bank fees, then the lesson is "banks exist and charge fees for a reason and now you know why".
If he was trying to avoid taxes, the lesson is "you want to operate outside the law you better be ready for the wild, wild west, baby!".
In other news, the NASDAQ was down 4% in 2018. This clearly means that all US stocks will be worthless in 25 years.
Actually browsed the link. The whole "once that decline begins, it will never end" thing is just bait to get people to read. They're projecting out for just a few generations at most.
More testing is needed. Interesting hypothesis. Real purpose of this post - someone appears someone to be hunting my posts and modding them troll. I'm occasionally a tad troll-like I'll admit but I'm getting modded down on very reasonable posts. This is bait.
Very good point. Yes, that's exactly what you want in a developed nation. I have one of those advanced jobs, and it's pretty sweet. So do you, probably.
Now, practically speaking, what do you do with the 60% of the US population that doesn't have a college degree? Forget about saying "get them a degree". That's just not gonna happen anytime soon. Changing the education rate in a country happens on the generational time-scale. Actually, it might not happen, ever. Americans are not inherently smarter or dumber than anyone else in the world, and the bottom quartile of a human population is dumb-as-a-brick. This is gonna sound elitist, but the bottom quartile is just not higher-ed material and probably never will be, barring something like wide-scale human genetic engineering.
So, we've got about 50 million people in this country who need jobs but can barely read, barely do basic math, and have very poor strategic thinking skills. Real-world question: what do we do with them? I want a practical answer. The ideological extemes have pie-in-the-sky solutions and they're crap. Right-wingers want the capitalist system to "take care of them" meaning they live in poverty as they get out-competed by the smarter/healthier. Great idea, except that we have 50 million super-pissed off people to deal with. That's a big number. Left-wingers want a UBI which sounds nice except so far nobody's been able to make the math work.
Keeping a reasonable number of low-skill, low-but-livable-wage manufacturing and service jobs around suddenly starts to sound like a decent alternative.
I actually know something about this, and I'm going to call at least a little bit of bs. What? A 20-man machine shop struggling to make 1000 screws per day? That's 50 screws per person, which boils down to 7-8 per hour. Even if you allow for 1 person on the team as a secretary, and 1 person to do QC, it still winds up in that ballpark.
10 minutes per screw. For a precision screw with all-machined features, this means that a crew of 18 machinists were making them manually. By hand, with very little automation.
I don't get it. Just two or three automated cnc machining stations should be able to crank these things at a much higher clip. One cnc lathe to do the basic geometry and the threads followed by a cut-off operation. Then they need to be manually moved into another fixture for the cutting of the head features, again by cnc and in bulk. At the end, bulk operations like plating, annealing or surface finishing, if the specs call for it.
This isn't specialized stuff. This sort of semi-robotic CNC station exists in virtually any mid- or large- sized machining company and there are thousands of them in the US. Two or three days of process development, purchase a lot of the stock material and boom, ready to go. I'd make a fairly large bet that the decision was price-driven and not availability. The same crew of 20 machinists in China cost 1/4 as much. Factor in shipping and the product is probably half the price overall. Don't claim an availability problem unless it's real please. Just say "we went with China cause they're cheaper" and move on. We're capitalists. We get it.
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Yes, a fair bit of it is spin, misinformation and gaslighting, and the US clearly got Ecuador to come over to it's side on the matter. I have no illusions about my own country. Initially, the US was doing everything in it's power to screw with him from any angle that it could, then for a few years they were content to keep him bottled up, but eventually decided to end the game and bring him in.
That being said, there's been enough coverage get a clear picture of him beyond the hype - he's a controlling megalomaniac who thought that he could hold his own playing power-geo-politics in the same arena as the US and Russia. The man thought that he could go toe-to-toe with a frikkin superpower. Talk about delusions of grandeur.
Wikileaks was a noble idea at the very start but it quickly got corrupted, and Assange himself is mostly to blame. If you're going to run a clean free-information clearinghouse, then you treat all submitted information the same and release it all in the same matter. Assange wasn't doing this. He was releasing some info, holding other info back, and timing the releases in order to settle scores and make points with whomever he chose. Sorry, you don't get to do that and simultaneously claim victimhood or nobility. Well, you can, but anyone with (IQ>90) isn't gonna buy it.
Yup. Political attitudes have changed and there's very little idealogical consistency any more. If the dems propose it, Republicans and conservatives will fight it to the death, and vice versa for the most part.
Nothing exemplifies this more than Obamacare. Obamacare is an attempt to use the power of free markets and capitalism to solve a social problem. It's the sort of idea that Republicans and conservatives would have been salivating over 20 years ago. But now? Put in place by a dem president, and a brown-skinned one at that? Clearly a herald of the coming of the antichrist.
Yeah, it's a really weird place, with some absolutely idiotic things. Interestingly, the same attitudes that give us that dumb stuff also give us the best (arguably) overall economy in the world, the strongest military by far, and top.place in most research and engineering fields. It's a mixed bag. Not for everyone.
People still blaming the cops on this one. Get a clue, please. This is the US. Guns outnumber people. It's just a cold, hard fact: US cops have to deal with a population that's swimming in guns, and it's their responsibility to somehow keep the "peace" So they assume that pretty much everyone they encounter is packing, which means they're going to escalate to gunfire very, very quickly in response to anything outside of "normal, quite street scene".
Cops are like this because of the choices we've made as a civilization about guns. We engineered this situation. I'm not making value judgments - just pointing out that the trade-off is absolutely clear. We really, really, really, really want free ownership of guns. But freedom isn't free - the cost is a high murder rate, school shootings and swat events gone bad. And it's obvious to me that we're generally ok with this tradeoff as a group. When gun violence makes the news, 20% of the population wrings their hands, 20% of the population goes out and buys more guns, and 60% shrugs their shoulders. After 72 hours everyone forgets about it. The dead get buried, maybe someone goes to prison, insurance companies write a few checks, more guns go into circulation, and everyone hangs around till the next event. We could have gotten rid of the guns decades ago if we really wanted to.
Oh, and here's a message to any NRA type who comes back with "guns don't cause increased violence" or "guns make schools safer" or any variant of that: shut the f*** up, grow a pair, and admit that your favorite toy comes with a blood price. No, your family is NOT safer cause you have a gun in the nightstand. Yes, school shootings are DEFINITELY linked to easy gun availability. Yes, our sky high murder rate is BECAUSE of guns. For Gods sake, just own up to the price we pay instead of hiding behind something that Charleton Heston spewed in support of a gun industry lobby. You'll get a ton more respect from me.
The swatter orchestrated an incredibly dangerous situation and is the one to blame for this. For what's basically a murder (not first degree) 20 years seems reasonable. He's not in for life, but he'll be in a cage long enough that his testosterone levels will be way lower when he gets out. He probably won't be a threat by then.
Yes, very impressive. 4% of the population signed an online petition. Bow before the power of the people!
Except an internet poll counts for very, very little. Try making your voice heard when it *really* matters. Like, say.... maybe in an election? If I recall, about 51% of the people who actually count (aka the ones that bother to vote) went for the collective temper-tantrum that is Brexit. It would take another referendum to stop it.
The world is in some sort of retrenching phase right now. Far left and right wings on the rise, anger breaking out everywhere, treaties and alliances crumbling. Crap leaders taking power or getting elected all over the world and voters seem alright with it. It's not for lack of good candidates. It's just that most leaders who dare to be reasonable get rapidly replaced by autocrats or demagogues who are shouting the most extreme stuff at the most extreme volume. I'm not sure what's going on. It's not limited to any country or region, so it must be something emergent in the whole population. Brexit is a small part of a much larger human trend.
We'll snap out of this eventually, but no country is gonna move forward for the next decade or two. I suspect that whatever country manages to backtrack the least will be the one that winds up on top. My money is on the U.S. or Europe.
While it's clear that some com companies are using dirty tricks to keep small players out of the game, smoothing this out isn't gonna magically grow fiber to the whole US. The US is a fairly large landmass. My understanding is that most countries with really good internet connection everywhere are pretty small in comparison. As in "equivalent to one or two US states" kind of small.
Someone prove me wrong? I'd love to see better net access here but we have LOTS of rural farmland.
All due respect to the grandson and the grandfather, but Theo Brown was a businessman of the time. If he had lived today, he would totally be working to lock his customers into exclusive maintenance channels. Business has changed, and that's how you make money nowadays. I like the idea of right-to-repair, but let's face it: it just isn't good business anymore. You're fighting capitalism. It's gonna be a *very* uphill battle.
Oof. Maybe just a tad harsh on the US? It's not exactly the shining beacon of white nobility that nationalists like to claim. But wow. Talk about vassal states first. The US has some imperialist tendencies but they're quite mild compared to other empires, both current and in the past. If you think being aligned with the U.S. is a vassal situation, try being under the thumb of China or Russia for a while, or Iran, or Britain about 150 years ago. Similar arguments for telecom equipment. Use US gear and the US will listen in. That's been shown. Use Chinese gear and the Chinese government will listen. 100% quaranteed. Use European equipment and .... well those governments are less likely to spy, but the gear will be billions more and years late. Not great choices, but.... well, we live in the real world. Pick your poison.
I've said this before, and for some reason tons of people take offense at this idea, but the only solution that I can see is to charge for communication. What I want is a cell phone number and an email that's linked to a bank account. You want to call, text or email me? It's gonna cost you about 5 cents, per communication. Money into my account. Up front. You want to talk to me, you gotta have a real identity, a real bank account in a reputable country and the ability and will to transfer a token amount of money to me.
Nobody who counts will balk at 5 pennies but no scammer or spammer is gonna cough up that much per person. It will shut their business model down cold. Overnight. My phone will stop ringing off the hook with trash calls and my email won't need a spam filter. My friends, colleagues and I will have cleaner lines of communication. Everyone who matters at all wins.
I understand that this would be a 2-way street. I'm willing to pay similar to send things to others. I wouldn't be making money at this.
It's always been like this. There were always bad sources of information out there. The targets have ALWAYS been the people with low intelligence, the people with brain chemical imbalances, the willfully-ignorant and the actually-ignorant. I was born in the 1970s, and there were ALWAYS conspiracy theories being thrown around. You think they were invented yesterday? The internet has just amplified the effect by 100.
You know that a news source is trustworthy when the people generating the news are named. The reporters, writers, and editors have actual names, and actual credentials. Where the people involved have actual journalistic credentials, and their source of income is transparent, and they have an explicit, written code of conduct that emphasizes factuality, and any bias is explicitly stated up front. Translation: a transparent, subscription-based news source.
She refuses to testify because she doesn't like the secrecy. But then she claims that she's already revealed everything there is to say. And somehow twists this into some sort of idealogical battle? This is a *very* fuzzy headed individual. Sigh. I guess that it's pretty common across the board. Humanity has put rationality in the back seat for the time being.
She won't win this fight unless she's ready to sit out the jail sentence. When a grand jury pulls you up and says "talk" you don't get a say in the matter, unless you're ready to plead the 5th or sit in a jail cell.
Yeah, I wouldn't believe this guy is dead unless I saw the body, took a tissue sample myself and verified the DNA. A body alone wouldn't be enough, and a smudge of DNA sans body wouldn't be enough either.
One possibility is that he stole it, spent/gambled/lost it, committed suicide and then tried to make his death look like a non-suicide for societal or insurance reasons. The other possibility is that he's alive and well living off 100+ million bucks somewhere. Maybe he was trying to do this but got killed by some criminal element in India. We'll probably know the whole story eventually. Once competent investigators start to trace the money, they can find virtually anything, anywhere.
I like the way things are right now. It's a good balance. There's secure encryption out there that's *very* hard for the government to break. If someone wants to use that stuff, they can, but it takes motivation. Apple products don't cut it - those are easy to break. You need pgp and stuff like that. If the government wants access to strongly-encrypted data, they have to get a subpoena. It's not easy. Two separate branches of the government (executive and judicial) have to agree that there's a legit reason. If the government meets that high bar, then they have rights to it. At that point, the person can either a) unlock the info or b) head to jail.
Some people in government feel that they should be able to poke into whatever, whenever, wherever they want. If we give these people control, we'll end up like China. No thanks. I like my western democracy. The executive branch+NSA has overstepped these bounds in the past and I don't approve at all. Suck it up, spooks! Spend the time, fill out the paperwork and get your frikkin subpeonas approved by a judge. Every. Single. Time. It's designed to be hard on purpose.
Some people on the other side feel that they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. Laws be damned. Some of these people call themselves libertarians, some call themselves anarchists, some are truly criminals, but a lot of them just don't like being told what to do. These people need to get a clue. If you want to live like that, find an uninhabited spot and live as a hermit. Rural Australia, Siberia and the Arctic are good candidates. You won't last long, but you'll be free according to your own terms. The second you want to live in a group with other people (aka a civilization) there are rules to follow.
Once Musk got into hot water with the SEC, he should have turned all his social media posting over to a small group of professional outreach people with a lawyer on the team. Why he kept control of it himself is a mystery to me. You do NOT screw with an SEC order like that. Ouch, what a dumb lesson for a very intelligent person to have to learn the hard way.
.... federal judges have REAL power. What was he thinking?'
Kind of reminds me of the Roger Stone situation. This is a VERY media-savvy guy. For some reason, he thought that he could get away with posting physically threatening imagery aimed at a federal judge, and violate a gag order at the same time. But this is frikkin federal judge we're talking about. Forget about "I'm famous in the tabloids and slightly rich"
Same thing goes for people like Trump and Manafort, thinking that they can somehow get around Mueller with a little bit of politicking and misdirection.
Come on, people. Learn to identify the real heavyweights or get squashed.
This is a modification of a previous post. It's all well and good for researchers to think about climate change. To me, it's pretty clear that climate science has the general picture right, even if individual models are all imperfect.
However, I doubt anything serious will be done until it becomes a *real* and *immediate* problem that's undeniable to *most* of the planet. In the past, humanity was able to do things proactively, like agree to limit fluorocarbons to fix the hole we punched in our ozone layer. Unfortunately, forward-thinking and cooperation is mostly dead, at least for the time being. Humanity is currently engaged in a full-blown session of head-up-ass (on multiple issues, not just climate change) and the bar for action in this area is very, very high.
A slight rise in temperature isn't real enough.
A slight increase in storm severity isn't enough.
The loss of one or two major breadbasket regions isn't enough. Food production will just shift around.
Anything that happens in a poor country isn't enough, including starvation. Poor people simply don't count enough to those with power and wealth.
Any effect that is limited to the coasts isn't enough. People will just move.
Any extinctions short of country-scale ecological collapse isn't enough. Most people don't care about plants and critters beyond eating them.
Anything that is limited to the arctic isn't enough. Nobody lives there.
Mass migrations from poor countries won't be enough. Rich countries will just put up barriers and allow populations to die.
Actually, humanity is starting to de-carbonize, but incrementally and not for ecological reasons. Renewables are slowly becoming more economically competitive than carbon-based energy. Will it happen before we change the planet in ways that impede our progress as a species? The jury is still out on that one.
As far as I can see, here are the only things that will force humanity to deal with the problem at a faster pace:
Environmental-related destruction that renders entire cities in the rich world uninhabitable. That level of economic damage won't be deniable.
Loss of enough major food-producing regions to affect the dinner tables of people in the rich world. When steak becomes unavailable, it'll be serious.
Beyond that, it's business as usual. Let's hope that geo-engineering is a viable option, because I suspect that we're going to need it.
Yes, immediate timeliness can be a factor. If you need it *now* and only one company can deliver it *now* then, yes, market forces can be overridden. So, you're right. If MS is currently the only vendor then perhaps the employees can make headway in setting policy. But, only if key employees back up the letter with a willingness to walk.
And only temporarily. >99% of the time the drive for profit eventually overrides everything. Given a few more years, another company could fill the need. Computer vision is advanced, but not all that advanced anymore. It's gone beyond the stage of "a few nobel-level people understand it".
I can't recall a single instance where employee activism actually had a significant effect on the activities/impacts of a for-profit company. I've seen tons of examples where the company just appoints some sort of insert-ethical-concern-here-compliance-officer and gives them some level of illusory authority to enforce ethics. And business goes on. It's window dressing, and the questionable activity just gets buried somewhere in the business that has less public exposure.
This doesn't mean I'm some sort of free market extremist. The effective way to control what companies can and can't do is through laws or regulation. Of course, the U.S. isn't going to prevent its companies from working with the DOD. So, back to my original statement. If I don't want to work on weapons, I find a company that doesn't develop weaponry and I work for them. Trying to change a company that's already taken on DOD contracts is most likely a fools errand.
Profit. It's the only reason that for-profit companies exist. They make money, or they die. If a company passes up an opportunity to make money, another company will step in. That's capitalism, baby! It's got tons of advantages, but cutthroat cold-heartedness is a downside to the system, and there isn't really any way around it. The Microsoft employees signing this petition have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that they work for a non-profit. They don't, and they don't get much of a say in company policy. Their only real option is to vote with their feet. That's how our system works. A few of my friends refused jobs because they didn't want to design/research/construct weapons. They found something else that suited them better. That's how you express your displeasure with an employer. Everything else is noise.
Heh. Heh. Heheheh. HAHAHAHAHA. That's MIGHTY progressive of them. They're TOTALLY fine with renewables. In 2040, AFTER peak oil, AFTER they've drilled most of the easy oil out of the ground and sold it to be burned and dumped into the atmosphere. After that, they're ALL FINE with the world getting behind renewables.
I guess at that point we can load up our electric vehicles as we mass-migrate out of the collapsed ecosystems that we've caused. Niiiice.
They've never been anywhere near a western democracy, but you're wrong that there was zero progress. Specifically, Deng (previous Chinese leader) had been encouraging small experiments in various kinds of democracy within China. Local-level government type of stuff to see if it would destablilize the society. They were doing it quietly but it was happening. They were experimenting with allowing higher levels of civic society to co-exist with the communist party. Their citizens were getting pulled out of poverty, getting at least a little internet access, getting more freedom to move and pick jobs, etc. etc. There was real debate within the Communist party as to how far to allow that stuff to progress.
Xi pulled the plug on a lot of it. Back to Emperor-style politics. Oh well. China will be less adaptable, less innovative and eventually weaker as a result, though the effects will take decades to manifest. Ultimately, the result will be one less country to seriously contend with the U.S. for dominance.
Up until fairly recently, the strategy worked. We allowed them into the world of modern trade and commerce and bought their stuff. Overall, the country became more open and more modern. The strategy helped to pull about half a billion people out of poverty. Yes, we had to tolerate a highly flawed Chinese government with a bad human rights record and a lot of dodgy Chinese business practices, but nothing worse than we've tolerated from a dozen other countries we regularly do business with. Overall, the benefits were enormous.
Then something changed. China started backsliding. The most obvious symptom of this is Xi Jingping, who has actively pulled the country back towards autocracy, but there's a long list of things that suggest our "do business with them and they'll improve" strategy isn't working any more. A lot of foreign policy types are concluding that a change is needed. I've read that even most pro-Chinese economists in the West have concluded that China is sliding backwards. The carrot isn't working any more, so governments are trying a bit of stick instead. They're not going to have much luck expanding their overseas businesses for the next decade or two.
I'm not sure "saving on fees" was the real motivation here. Tax avoidance sounds a lot more likely. In any case, ouch. Note to all 30 year olds: just because you're smart in one area doesn't mean you're master of all. Be careful. What you don't know CAN hurt you. Hard lesson to learn but I'm not sure which lesson is relevant here.
If the guy was just trying to save bank fees, then the lesson is "banks exist and charge fees for a reason and now you know why".
If he was trying to avoid taxes, the lesson is "you want to operate outside the law you better be ready for the wild, wild west, baby!".
In other news, the NASDAQ was down 4% in 2018. This clearly means that all US stocks will be worthless in 25 years.
Actually browsed the link. The whole "once that decline begins, it will never end" thing is just bait to get people to read. They're projecting out for just a few generations at most.
More testing is needed. Interesting hypothesis. Real purpose of this post - someone appears someone to be hunting my posts and modding them troll. I'm occasionally a tad troll-like I'll admit but I'm getting modded down on very reasonable posts. This is bait.
Very good point. Yes, that's exactly what you want in a developed nation. I have one of those advanced jobs, and it's pretty sweet. So do you, probably.
Now, practically speaking, what do you do with the 60% of the US population that doesn't have a college degree? Forget about saying "get them a degree". That's just not gonna happen anytime soon. Changing the education rate in a country happens on the generational time-scale. Actually, it might not happen, ever. Americans are not inherently smarter or dumber than anyone else in the world, and the bottom quartile of a human population is dumb-as-a-brick. This is gonna sound elitist, but the bottom quartile is just not higher-ed material and probably never will be, barring something like wide-scale human genetic engineering. So, we've got about 50 million people in this country who need jobs but can barely read, barely do basic math, and have very poor strategic thinking skills. Real-world question: what do we do with them? I want a practical answer. The ideological extemes have pie-in-the-sky solutions and they're crap. Right-wingers want the capitalist system to "take care of them" meaning they live in poverty as they get out-competed by the smarter/healthier. Great idea, except that we have 50 million super-pissed off people to deal with. That's a big number. Left-wingers want a UBI which sounds nice except so far nobody's been able to make the math work.
Keeping a reasonable number of low-skill, low-but-livable-wage manufacturing and service jobs around suddenly starts to sound like a decent alternative.
I actually know something about this, and I'm going to call at least a little bit of bs. What? A 20-man machine shop struggling to make 1000 screws per day? That's 50 screws per person, which boils down to 7-8 per hour. Even if you allow for 1 person on the team as a secretary, and 1 person to do QC, it still winds up in that ballpark.
10 minutes per screw. For a precision screw with all-machined features, this means that a crew of 18 machinists were making them manually. By hand, with very little automation.
I don't get it. Just two or three automated cnc machining stations should be able to crank these things at a much higher clip. One cnc lathe to do the basic geometry and the threads followed by a cut-off operation. Then they need to be manually moved into another fixture for the cutting of the head features, again by cnc and in bulk. At the end, bulk operations like plating, annealing or surface finishing, if the specs call for it.
This isn't specialized stuff. This sort of semi-robotic CNC station exists in virtually any mid- or large- sized machining company and there are thousands of them in the US. Two or three days of process development, purchase a lot of the stock material and boom, ready to go. I'd make a fairly large bet that the decision was price-driven and not availability. The same crew of 20 machinists in China cost 1/4 as much. Factor in shipping and the product is probably half the price overall. Don't claim an availability problem unless it's real please. Just say "we went with China cause they're cheaper" and move on. We're capitalists. We get it.