Agreed. I think that this is less an issue of Korean vs. Western culture and more an issue of chain of command problems. In the United States, CRM came into play following the UA173 crash in Portland back in 1978; the FAA specifically called out poor cockpit management and communication as one of the primary causes of the accident.
First, this isn't something that is unique to Korean or East Asian societies. Western nations, including the supposedly more egalitarian United States, had the exact same problem of cockpit hierarchy through the 1970s. Only after the crash of United Airlines Flight 173 did the West begin reorganize the way it trains its pilots, leading to the implementation of Cockpit Resource Management which retrained the way American aircrews operated.
Second, it should also be noted that Korean Air underwent similar reorganization following the 1999 Guam accident, leading to an effectively accident free record 14 years onward even with a crew of primarily Korean pilots. So you can wave all this nonsense about cultural hierarchy and whatnot, but in the end, it's more a matter of training and personnel organization.
In a broader view, this sort of hierarchical issue is less a unique problem to Korean society and more a problem of managing a chain of command. You see these sorts of problems all the time in the West: operating rooms, military units, etc. I would even argue that the real problem was that both the American pilots and Korean ones are all former Air Force pilots, used to operating in strictly hierarchical cultures where the pilot is on top of the food chain. It required CRM-type training to "deprogram" some of those authoritarian tendencies and play nicely.
Notice that the EU makes no mention of their member states spying against US citizens. So while it's morally and fundamentally wrong for the US to spy on Europeans, it is the patriotic duty of European nations to not just regularly spy on but to steal from US citizens for the sake of their national interests.
But which is worse? The President that started the program, or the President elected to replace him who ran on a platform calling for change and dismantling of such programs only to continue and expand upon it?
He just regurgitated the law. The law states that intelligence services like the NSA aren't legally allowed to spy on US citizens. He probably didn't know that they were doing exactly that.
Nowhere; he's just a guy who was supposed to be in the chain-of-command that got bypassed. The check is supposed to be between the White House (which the CIA, DoD and DoJ report to), the Congress (which funds all three) and the Judiciary (which theoretically checks their actions through FISA). Of course, whether those checks are working is a very different question.
In all honesty, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has always been a toothless, powerless position. While the job was created post-9/11 to be an integrator for all the different US intelligence services, it was structured in a way that it had no leverage (read budget control) over any of the organizations. The CIA resents DNI because it's position in theory is what the Director of the CIA is traditionally supposed to be doing. The DoD intel services get their money from the Pentagon and the FBI from the Justice Department. If anything, the DNI has been a bit of a joke in Washington DC, a cursed appointment that never amounts to anything. It gets no credit for the few public successes and is a cheap scapegoat when things go wrong. I honestly think that the DNI really didn't fully know what was going on when he went to make his presentation.
Agreed. This is what creates problems when warhead counts drop below a certain point. Assume the Chinese have about, say 400 warheads. The US and Russia reduce their warhead count to about 600 each. There is going to be a LOT of temptation for the Chinese to increase their arsenal up to the 600 warhead level in order to achieve parity, to help cement their global superpower status. Or if the number comes down further, to say 300 warheads for those three nations. Other nations that rely on nuclear deterrents, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis and the North Koreans, may be tempted to build more weapons to achieve parity. Parity, which was not achievable when the difference in arsenals was an order of magnitude, might become a temptation when it would only require a small step forward.
Certain specialized professions in the United States also has these sorts of controls, usually through licensing and whatnot. Doctors in the United States for example are controlled tightly by the American Medical Association (AMA). They dictate the number of students allowed into medical schools, the numbers licensed, etc. Law is theoretically the same as the American Bar Association (ABA) controls the number of lawyers licensed each year. However, unlike AMA which tightly controls production, ABA has been very loose with it, so whereas, people complain about the lack of doctors driving up wages, people are also complaining about the sheer glut of lawyers destabilizing the legal field.
I completely agree that mass surveillance of all people, American citizens or not, is morally wrong and is not something the United States should be engaged in. However, this article and this particular leak is not about that. In this case, the leak was talking about government-on-government spying that is conducted by all nations of the world, not simply those with the resources or inclination. If your "democratic sovereign state" is a size beyond a city-state, it most likely doing the exact same thing to both the United States and member nations of the European Union (and yes, I would bet that even EU states are spying on each other).
Had Snowden simply focused on the mass surveillance issue, then he would be praised as a whistleblower and help keep the focus on this key issue. However, by going about and spilling on "legitimate" espionage, he has crossed the line from simply raising humans rights abuses to deliberately damaging American diplomatic efforts, espionage and counterespionage efforts. This will place American diplomacy at a disadvantage against the EU, China and Russia for several years as those nations' espionage machinery will still be at full force. Now, if you're happy to see the United States' foreign policy machinery sabotaged, then feel free to celebrate. However, from an American perspective, Snowden has crossed a line going from simply reporting wrongdoing to outright hurting the US. His motives are now drawn into question which are going to hurt his chances of telling his story or even convincing policymakers to rethink what they're doing.
Agreed. I think that Snowden hurts his own credibility and his self-professed cause by spilling out all the details of United States espionage activities overseas. Had Snowden had a compelling whistleblower case by simply reporting on US domestic spying; many would view him as a patriot (as he self-proclaimed) for reporting on these abuses. However, muddies the water tremendously, I would even argue crosses the line, by providing details of US intelligence activities overseas, not just to the European Union but also to the Chinese and the Russians. Those actions directly harming his home country, undermining American intelligence activities against nations that have comprehensive espionage programs targeted at the United States (this includes European nations).
People are looking for conspiracy when the truth is sadly nothing more than a bureaucratic process. This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship: if the government was truly trying to block any access to Snowden or the reports, they would black out any website that had his name or even block out all news sites and blogs. No, this is purely bureaucratic procedure. Let's think of this:
1. Government regulations say you can't have classified materials on an unclassified machine. 2. If classified materials get onto an unclassified computer, then bureaucratic policy requires you to go through a whole process of scrubbing it, involving lots of man-hours and stacks of paperwork. 3. The material leaked is, from a bureaucratic perspective, still classified because it never went through the declassifying process. 4. Therefore, if the actual classified material posted by the Guardian gets onto an unclassified computer, bureaucratic policy dictates you go through and scrub the machine. 5. Mid-level bureaucrat is unhappy because he loses his machine for a few hours when IT whisks it away; IT bureaucrat unhappy because of the paperwork he has to do.
This is not about censorship; a government employee can simply go to CNN, BBC or al-Jazeera. No, this is about a bureaucrat who doesn't want to go and scrub a thousand machines that may have accidentally downloaded a file that is considered "contaminated" by the bureaucratic machinery.
It would never work and never happen. For one, the United States already has huge numbers of Chinese students who have been regularly coming and going to the United States for decades, and it hasn't had any real noticeable impact. If anything, the United States university system is pretty much at the boundaries of how many Chinese students it can bring in without displacing other foreign nationals and even hurting US students as well.
Also, it worked in Europe because the economic differences between those nations was not severe. The gap in standard of living and opportunities is still so severe between the United States and China, that an open door policy would result in a MASSIVE flood of low-skill immigration. The United States is barely able to support the large influx of immigrants from a nation of 112 million, how do you think it will cope with open borders from a nation of 1.2 billion and an even lower per capita income?
My only real nit with the UN's debate is that they've swept in a lot of automated defense systems into this category of killer robots, things like automated missile defense / point defense systems (Phalanx/CWIS on large naval vessels, Iron Dome type systems) that are purely defensive in nature and may actually be beneficial to civilian populations. These sorts of systems are automated because their targets move so quickly that humans can't do much manually beyond just flipping the "on" switch. No problem investigating more aggressive anti-personnel systems like the Korean anti-personnel systems on the DMZ.
Hate to break it to you, but the US flies drones and fires missiles on Pakistani targets because the Pakistani government lets them (albeit quietly). If Pakistan really wanted to stop drone attacks, all it would do is deploy a couple of anti-aircraft batteries and scramble their fighters to bring those drones out of the sky. You don't need nuclear weapons to discourage the United States from taking such action.
To be fair, this has less to do with direct hatred for Tesla itself and more out of fear that if Tesla succeeds, then the established automakers may decide to break the dealer networks and directly begin selling vehicles to consumers instead.
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
You're misunderstanding the motivations of the SEA and other small activist groups. These groups are in part motivated by what they feel is a lack of sufficient attention to their cause. They want attention drawn to them, and given their initial low profile, any attention is good. The Onion is a very high profile website. Hacking the Onion gave them the widespread publicity they so crave. Think of it, now people who read Slashdot know who the SEA are.
If that were truly the case, then why are there literally hundreds, if not thousands of dead South Koreans at the hands of the North during the post-Korean War period? Even if we discount all the attempted political assassinations and military skirmishes, why do they shell civilian villages, kidnap fishermen, hijack and even bomb commercial aircraft? "Racial unity" is lip service by both sides, more of a theoretical aspiration fueled by nationalism that begins to quickly disintegrate when the price tag for both sides comes up.
Not to burst your bubble, but bullying is by far not a purely American product. The details may be different country to country, but childhood bullying is unfortunately universal.
I think North Korea is clearly in the "show of strength" mode, and I would argue that the United States, and in particular, the South Koreans, have been doing what they can to "ignore" the North despite some very hard shoves (sinking of a corvette, shelling of a border town). The problem now is that the South is getting sick of being pushed, and the next time the North tries something, the South may decide that it's time to throw a punch. The question then becomes whether the North fights back, turning this thing into a nasty brawl, or the North backs off knowing that it can't win a fight.
My guess is that they were finding more and more of their own citizens with "tourist" cellphones, and the idea of so many with relatively unrestricted access to the outside world was simply not worth the risk.
The issue with rare earth metals has never been access to them, contrary to the article, but cost. If it were simply a matter of access, the United States, Australia and other nations have massive supplies. However, producers in those nations were driven out of business because the cost of extracting them in a clean, (relatively) environmentally friendly manner was simply not competitive with the Chinese, who can afford to undercut foreign producers due to their notoriously lax environmental regulations. Now this new methodology may be helpful in that it drives down the cost of production to become competitive again, but I am concerned that it may create tremendous environmental damage.
It's funny how everyone latches on to the example of prostitution and ignore the main point which is that the dangers of money laundering are very real. One can debate about the morality of a specific crime or two, but one can easily find other reasons: arms trafficking, extortion, good ol' fashion theft, corruption and slush funds, etc. At very least, cracking down on money laundering pushes more and more large financial transactions in the open, making it harder for LARGE entities, from cartels to corporations to governments, to hide their transactions from the public.
Will these animals even behave the same when they are recreated? After all, animals, like humans, have certain "cultures" where the parents teach their young how to effectively hunt, what to avoid, etc. Recreating an animal won't capture that. At most, they may have the same base instincts driving them, but they may effectively be completely different animals.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I think that this is less an issue of Korean vs. Western culture and more an issue of chain of command problems. In the United States, CRM came into play following the UA173 crash in Portland back in 1978; the FAA specifically called out poor cockpit management and communication as one of the primary causes of the accident.
First, this isn't something that is unique to Korean or East Asian societies. Western nations, including the supposedly more egalitarian United States, had the exact same problem of cockpit hierarchy through the 1970s. Only after the crash of United Airlines Flight 173 did the West begin reorganize the way it trains its pilots, leading to the implementation of Cockpit Resource Management which retrained the way American aircrews operated.
Second, it should also be noted that Korean Air underwent similar reorganization following the 1999 Guam accident, leading to an effectively accident free record 14 years onward even with a crew of primarily Korean pilots. So you can wave all this nonsense about cultural hierarchy and whatnot, but in the end, it's more a matter of training and personnel organization.
In a broader view, this sort of hierarchical issue is less a unique problem to Korean society and more a problem of managing a chain of command. You see these sorts of problems all the time in the West: operating rooms, military units, etc. I would even argue that the real problem was that both the American pilots and Korean ones are all former Air Force pilots, used to operating in strictly hierarchical cultures where the pilot is on top of the food chain. It required CRM-type training to "deprogram" some of those authoritarian tendencies and play nicely.
Notice that the EU makes no mention of their member states spying against US citizens. So while it's morally and fundamentally wrong for the US to spy on Europeans, it is the patriotic duty of European nations to not just regularly spy on but to steal from US citizens for the sake of their national interests.
But which is worse? The President that started the program, or the President elected to replace him who ran on a platform calling for change and dismantling of such programs only to continue and expand upon it?
He just regurgitated the law. The law states that intelligence services like the NSA aren't legally allowed to spy on US citizens. He probably didn't know that they were doing exactly that.
Nowhere; he's just a guy who was supposed to be in the chain-of-command that got bypassed. The check is supposed to be between the White House (which the CIA, DoD and DoJ report to), the Congress (which funds all three) and the Judiciary (which theoretically checks their actions through FISA). Of course, whether those checks are working is a very different question.
In all honesty, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has always been a toothless, powerless position. While the job was created post-9/11 to be an integrator for all the different US intelligence services, it was structured in a way that it had no leverage (read budget control) over any of the organizations. The CIA resents DNI because it's position in theory is what the Director of the CIA is traditionally supposed to be doing. The DoD intel services get their money from the Pentagon and the FBI from the Justice Department. If anything, the DNI has been a bit of a joke in Washington DC, a cursed appointment that never amounts to anything. It gets no credit for the few public successes and is a cheap scapegoat when things go wrong. I honestly think that the DNI really didn't fully know what was going on when he went to make his presentation.
Agreed. This is what creates problems when warhead counts drop below a certain point. Assume the Chinese have about, say 400 warheads. The US and Russia reduce their warhead count to about 600 each. There is going to be a LOT of temptation for the Chinese to increase their arsenal up to the 600 warhead level in order to achieve parity, to help cement their global superpower status. Or if the number comes down further, to say 300 warheads for those three nations. Other nations that rely on nuclear deterrents, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis and the North Koreans, may be tempted to build more weapons to achieve parity. Parity, which was not achievable when the difference in arsenals was an order of magnitude, might become a temptation when it would only require a small step forward.
Certain specialized professions in the United States also has these sorts of controls, usually through licensing and whatnot. Doctors in the United States for example are controlled tightly by the American Medical Association (AMA). They dictate the number of students allowed into medical schools, the numbers licensed, etc. Law is theoretically the same as the American Bar Association (ABA) controls the number of lawyers licensed each year. However, unlike AMA which tightly controls production, ABA has been very loose with it, so whereas, people complain about the lack of doctors driving up wages, people are also complaining about the sheer glut of lawyers destabilizing the legal field.
I completely agree that mass surveillance of all people, American citizens or not, is morally wrong and is not something the United States should be engaged in. However, this article and this particular leak is not about that. In this case, the leak was talking about government-on-government spying that is conducted by all nations of the world, not simply those with the resources or inclination. If your "democratic sovereign state" is a size beyond a city-state, it most likely doing the exact same thing to both the United States and member nations of the European Union (and yes, I would bet that even EU states are spying on each other).
Had Snowden simply focused on the mass surveillance issue, then he would be praised as a whistleblower and help keep the focus on this key issue. However, by going about and spilling on "legitimate" espionage, he has crossed the line from simply raising humans rights abuses to deliberately damaging American diplomatic efforts, espionage and counterespionage efforts. This will place American diplomacy at a disadvantage against the EU, China and Russia for several years as those nations' espionage machinery will still be at full force. Now, if you're happy to see the United States' foreign policy machinery sabotaged, then feel free to celebrate. However, from an American perspective, Snowden has crossed a line going from simply reporting wrongdoing to outright hurting the US. His motives are now drawn into question which are going to hurt his chances of telling his story or even convincing policymakers to rethink what they're doing.
Agreed. I think that Snowden hurts his own credibility and his self-professed cause by spilling out all the details of United States espionage activities overseas. Had Snowden had a compelling whistleblower case by simply reporting on US domestic spying; many would view him as a patriot (as he self-proclaimed) for reporting on these abuses. However, muddies the water tremendously, I would even argue crosses the line, by providing details of US intelligence activities overseas, not just to the European Union but also to the Chinese and the Russians. Those actions directly harming his home country, undermining American intelligence activities against nations that have comprehensive espionage programs targeted at the United States (this includes European nations).
People are looking for conspiracy when the truth is sadly nothing more than a bureaucratic process. This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship: if the government was truly trying to block any access to Snowden or the reports, they would black out any website that had his name or even block out all news sites and blogs. No, this is purely bureaucratic procedure. Let's think of this:
1. Government regulations say you can't have classified materials on an unclassified machine.
2. If classified materials get onto an unclassified computer, then bureaucratic policy requires you to go through a whole process of scrubbing it, involving lots of man-hours and stacks of paperwork.
3. The material leaked is, from a bureaucratic perspective, still classified because it never went through the declassifying process.
4. Therefore, if the actual classified material posted by the Guardian gets onto an unclassified computer, bureaucratic policy dictates you go through and scrub the machine.
5. Mid-level bureaucrat is unhappy because he loses his machine for a few hours when IT whisks it away; IT bureaucrat unhappy because of the paperwork he has to do.
This is not about censorship; a government employee can simply go to CNN, BBC or al-Jazeera. No, this is about a bureaucrat who doesn't want to go and scrub a thousand machines that may have accidentally downloaded a file that is considered "contaminated" by the bureaucratic machinery.
It would never work and never happen. For one, the United States already has huge numbers of Chinese students who have been regularly coming and going to the United States for decades, and it hasn't had any real noticeable impact. If anything, the United States university system is pretty much at the boundaries of how many Chinese students it can bring in without displacing other foreign nationals and even hurting US students as well.
Also, it worked in Europe because the economic differences between those nations was not severe. The gap in standard of living and opportunities is still so severe between the United States and China, that an open door policy would result in a MASSIVE flood of low-skill immigration. The United States is barely able to support the large influx of immigrants from a nation of 112 million, how do you think it will cope with open borders from a nation of 1.2 billion and an even lower per capita income?
My only real nit with the UN's debate is that they've swept in a lot of automated defense systems into this category of killer robots, things like automated missile defense / point defense systems (Phalanx/CWIS on large naval vessels, Iron Dome type systems) that are purely defensive in nature and may actually be beneficial to civilian populations. These sorts of systems are automated because their targets move so quickly that humans can't do much manually beyond just flipping the "on" switch. No problem investigating more aggressive anti-personnel systems like the Korean anti-personnel systems on the DMZ.
Hate to break it to you, but the US flies drones and fires missiles on Pakistani targets because the Pakistani government lets them (albeit quietly). If Pakistan really wanted to stop drone attacks, all it would do is deploy a couple of anti-aircraft batteries and scramble their fighters to bring those drones out of the sky. You don't need nuclear weapons to discourage the United States from taking such action.
To be fair, this has less to do with direct hatred for Tesla itself and more out of fear that if Tesla succeeds, then the established automakers may decide to break the dealer networks and directly begin selling vehicles to consumers instead.
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
You're misunderstanding the motivations of the SEA and other small activist groups. These groups are in part motivated by what they feel is a lack of sufficient attention to their cause. They want attention drawn to them, and given their initial low profile, any attention is good. The Onion is a very high profile website. Hacking the Onion gave them the widespread publicity they so crave. Think of it, now people who read Slashdot know who the SEA are.
If that were truly the case, then why are there literally hundreds, if not thousands of dead South Koreans at the hands of the North during the post-Korean War period? Even if we discount all the attempted political assassinations and military skirmishes, why do they shell civilian villages, kidnap fishermen, hijack and even bomb commercial aircraft? "Racial unity" is lip service by both sides, more of a theoretical aspiration fueled by nationalism that begins to quickly disintegrate when the price tag for both sides comes up.
Not to burst your bubble, but bullying is by far not a purely American product. The details may be different country to country, but childhood bullying is unfortunately universal.
I think North Korea is clearly in the "show of strength" mode, and I would argue that the United States, and in particular, the South Koreans, have been doing what they can to "ignore" the North despite some very hard shoves (sinking of a corvette, shelling of a border town). The problem now is that the South is getting sick of being pushed, and the next time the North tries something, the South may decide that it's time to throw a punch. The question then becomes whether the North fights back, turning this thing into a nasty brawl, or the North backs off knowing that it can't win a fight.
My guess is that they were finding more and more of their own citizens with "tourist" cellphones, and the idea of so many with relatively unrestricted access to the outside world was simply not worth the risk.
The issue with rare earth metals has never been access to them, contrary to the article, but cost. If it were simply a matter of access, the United States, Australia and other nations have massive supplies. However, producers in those nations were driven out of business because the cost of extracting them in a clean, (relatively) environmentally friendly manner was simply not competitive with the Chinese, who can afford to undercut foreign producers due to their notoriously lax environmental regulations. Now this new methodology may be helpful in that it drives down the cost of production to become competitive again, but I am concerned that it may create tremendous environmental damage.
It's funny how everyone latches on to the example of prostitution and ignore the main point which is that the dangers of money laundering are very real. One can debate about the morality of a specific crime or two, but one can easily find other reasons: arms trafficking, extortion, good ol' fashion theft, corruption and slush funds, etc. At very least, cracking down on money laundering pushes more and more large financial transactions in the open, making it harder for LARGE entities, from cartels to corporations to governments, to hide their transactions from the public.
Will these animals even behave the same when they are recreated? After all, animals, like humans, have certain "cultures" where the parents teach their young how to effectively hunt, what to avoid, etc. Recreating an animal won't capture that. At most, they may have the same base instincts driving them, but they may effectively be completely different animals.