Find me a first hand account denying that Jesus did any of the things in the Bible, written by someone that was there.
Are you kidding me? You want me to dig up the police logs from Jerusalem, April 0034? Most of the people living there at the time didn't believe in the miracles or the resurrection, or they'd have been Christians too. Go read about the inconsistencies among just the four canonical Gospels, then tell me that no-one changed any of the story.
it was confirmed by hundreds more
It was believed by hundreds more, many of whom had no first-hand knowledge.
Even though you're posting AC and consistently misspelled one of the keywords for the topic at hand, you're fairly coherent, so I guess you deserve a brief rebuttal.
rather than as an intellectual shotgun
That was, in fact, exactly what I was trying to do. The OP was making a blanket statement that the Bible was historically accurate and complete, and I wanted to make the point that there's been a whole goshdarn lot of disagreement over the past three millenia about what belongs in it.
The links to the Islam and Jewish Christians articles may have been misplaced, but the point remains that there were plenty of people in the area at the time who didn't see any reason to believe in the resurrection, and were no doubt writing their own religious texts. The same is true of the Paulicans: it doesn't matter if Paul said something different than what they said. They're an example of resurrection-deniers.
The Masoretic text is from the 8th Century, when Christians had been using the LXX for hundreds of years
The point is, again, that the Masoretic version and the Septuagint differ, and someone made a choice . There isn't one single version that everyone has always been reading from. And unless I'm mistaken, Protestants use the Masoretic text for the OT.
The reason the cannon is cannon is because they selected those books which nobody had a problem with that were widely used.
The reason the canon is the way it is has plenty of politics and power struggles mixed in to it.
were relegated to 'Deuterocannonical' status (these are the 'Apocrypha' that were removed from most Protestant Bibles
You seem to have misread one of those articles. Deuterocanonical books are those that are used by the Catholic Church but which are not a part of the Hebrew Bible. They're canonical. Apocrypha, on the other hand, are not. The KJV (a Protestant Bible) originally included the Catholic Deuterocanonical books under the "Apocrypha" heading.
I'm not claiming to be a Biblical scholar; most of what I sort-of-know is half-remembered from confirmation classes way back when. The point stands, however, that the Bible is neither complete nor entirely historically accurate.
Here's a quick summary of Horus, stolen from the movie Religulous:
Right. As you so eloquently put it: citation, please. That story, which you have taken from a propaganda film, apparently comes from a single book. I found some sort of a writeup. There's some disagreement at the same site, and not much mention anywhere else.
It's not really a frame-up, though: you're not doing something bad and blaming it on someone else, you're doing a good thing, expecting that there will be improper retaliation, and redirecting that retaliation to where it can't do any harm anyways.
If the management at the poster's company think that someone they fired is "causing trouble" and try to harm that person's ability to get another job (pretty much the only thing they can do to a person who they've fired), the fired person can probably mount a successful lawsuit under federal employment law, and management will know that. On the other hand, management can make life miserable for the poster, still employed at the company, under any number of excuses that the poster would have a hard time proving are retaliatory.
There were plentyofpeople from the time of Jesus's death through many centuries who denied or argued various aspects of Jesus's humanity, divinity, status as a prophet or the Messiah, and resurrection.
The current Bible canon is only a selection of the books that the Catholic Church decided were the right ones in the 16th century. They also had to select one of at least two available manuscripts for what became the Old Testament. Other denominations have othercanons. There's a pile of books that are left out, and some which are left in that have disputedauthorship.
A lot of what's in the Bible is historically accurate, some percentage of it is repeated and probably exaggerated, and there's a lot of stuff that was written in the same span of time (anywhere from 10 to 15 centuries) that isn't in there. You are glossing over so much history it's amazing. Just take a look at this one wikipedia page, if nothing else: The Bible and History.
Persons who are citizens of the Federated Republic of Germany are Germans.
Citizens of the People's Republic of China -> Chinese.
Commonwealth of Australia -> Australians.
United Arab Emirates -> Emirati.
Persons who are citizens of the United States of America, despite accusations of chauvinism, are Americans. Citizens of the United Mexican States are Mexicans, not Americans, even though their United States is also located in North America.
It's generally thought polite to let the country itself define its demonym, and that name is not always "geographically correct" (see "Emirati" above).
But I wonder if that isn't because most of us in the West have seen enough Eastern-produced (I guess usually Japanese) cartoons, which come with voices and other context, that we can work it out. For me, the "happy eyes" emoticon definitely brings a generic Japanese-made cartoon face to mind, whereas the:-) is a generic bright yellow smiley face. I'm sure that both of these impressions, rather than being inherent in my facial processing, are culturally influenced.
It would not astonish me to learn that such things as fake ATMs were available, essentially, "retail" (or at least "built on demand"). That is to say, there's a technically inclined someone (who probably knows about Defcon, yes), building the machines but then selling them to the person who actually uses them. The seller doesn't put them into use. The buyer might not know any more about the operation of the machine than what it says in the instruction manual that the builder provided.
I don't have any real information, but it seems a plausible scenario to me.
In the US, any idea fixed in a tangible medium, say, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, or posted to an online forum, is in fact, without any further action, copyright of the person who did the fixing.
Yes, but Palin did actually try to say that the fact that Alaska was so close to Russia across the Bering Strait gave her insight into the Russia-Georgia conflict. Or something. From an interview on ABC:
PALIN: . ..That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.That's why we have to keep an eye on Russia. And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?
At least he does such a terrible job of writing that none of us have to worry about him convincing anyone of anything. The grammar is poor, the verbiage clichéd, and the arguments vacuous. It reads like a high-school essay. Doesn't anyone edit his damn submissions?
"Template" in this case may be a poorly-chosen word. It doesn't mean C++ style template, it's more like "Pick from this list the category of app you want to write. Okay, now here's a whole bunch of boilerplate code with 98% of the framework calls you'd have to write already made for you." Then you essentially, yes, just write your OpenGL code (plain C is legal Obj-C), change some arguments in those framework calls, and compile!
Obj-C, btw, isn't too hard to pick up. It only adds one major syntactical feature to C, for calling methods on objects. Lack of automatic garbage collection can be annoying, but learning Apple's frameworks is really the hardest part. Seems to be a good way to make some money on the side these days.
It wasn't the judge's decision. This was a criminal trial involving a jury. The defense convinced the jury that there was a reasonable doubt that the accused was illegally carrying a weapon, and they acquitted him on that charge.
Baloney. The casino trusts me when I'm playing their video poker? They've got cameras watching me, security guards wandering by, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were monitoring the machine itself to make sure I haven't cracked it somehow. ATMs, too: I'm a trusted operator only to the extent that I verify that I have a legitimate claim to access an account. I've got less authority than a non-admin user on a *nix system. When was the last time your ATM let you delete transaction records, or gave you a listing of all the accounts at your bank?
Perfectly true and well-written, but it still doesn't explain a manager's salary being in a different order of magnitude from an engineer's. Everyone has work to do, which impacts everyone else. If management doesn't clear the decks for producers to be able to focus, or if producers don't generate results, or if salesmen fail to acquire new clients, no one eats.
Sure, the owner of a company, and one or two officers at the absolute top, and on whom ultimate responsibility for everything falls, have a greater stake and therefore should get a greater return, but it should still be proportionate and justified.
The phrase "to better say it" is awkward. However, pedantry in the critique of a long, semi-professionally presented, and ostensibly edited, piece of journalism is not the same sin that it is in the context of a Slashdot post. Furthermore, a split infinitive isnotalwaysungrammatical.
Strongly agree. I had to re-read and consciously parse way too many sentences. The two missing possessive apostrophes right in the second sentence really kick things off with a bang, and it doesn't get better. There are several sentences where it is clear that you wrote one thing, changed your mind, and then didn't re-read the result, but left a word dangling from the first version. Poor grammar and sentence structure in a run-of-the-mill/. post is one thing, but this is supposed to be a finished (professional?) piece, and it reads like a high-school essay.
Poor grammar is distracting for someone who knows what you've done wrong but can tease out what you meant to say; that person has to do too much conscious syntactical work while reading, and has difficulty concentrating on the content. For someone who doesn't know what's wrong, the writing is just unclear. That person will not take in what you are trying to communicate. In both cases, you have failed in your objective: to transmit your ideas to another person.
samzenpus gets a big thumbs-down on this one too. This piece (like others before it) was not "edited" in any meaningful sense. Maybe the/. position "editor" should be renamed "story poster".
I sure am a geek, and voting for third parties, as far as I am concerned, is covered by game theory: we have a situation where both of us voting for the third party (cooperating) will result in what we most want, and both of us voting major party (defecting) will result in a worse, but acceptable, outcome. If one of us defects and the other cooperates, we'll both be very very unhappy for four years.
The payoffs look like this: CC > DD > CD > DC. (The last two could be ranked either way: either you feel good for "doing the right thing", so get a little psychological bonus for cooperating, or you feel like an ass for "helping Bush win", in which case DC > CD) It's very important to note that this is not one of the three classic dilemmas for two-choice games, because there's not really any temptation to defect; but feels a little like Chicken, because we both need to trust each other in order to win. There's sort of a phantom temptation.
What is the source of this "phantom" temptation? It's the fact that we don't really believe enough other voters are rational enough to figure this out.
I think the argument you make can be turned on its head: if it is true that some individual knows that everyone else as a group is going to vote for the major party candidate, that individual is perfectly free to vote for the third party without changing the election. As more and more voters make that realization and choice, less and less of the entire group is voting for the major party. At some point, the third party gets more votes than the major party, and then more than the other major party. Right now we are stuck in the middle, with not enough people voting for the third party to make it win.
It's entirely possible that this is an honest problem: each voter may very well be marking the ballot for his or her actually preferred candidate. If there's some majority percentage of the electorate that as a group supports Gore and Nader rather than Bush, but that percentage is likewise split such that Bush is favored by a plurality of the total electorate, then we have either a failure of perception (Gore and Nader supporters are being seen as closer than they actually are), or a failure by the political parties to offer a candidate that actually appeals to a majority of the country. This isn't very likely, however.
What I think is much more likely is a failure of individual voters to understand that it is literally true that they have one vote, and that it counts, and that it is important that they each vote for their honestly preferred candidate. Each individual person has to make that decision, and then everyone will have made that decision.
Your description of low-skill jobs is accurate, but does not apply to a job which requires any sort of training. A person employed at a small business, doing reasonably skilled work, with a few years' experience, could cause serious problems for an employer if he were to suddenly quit. It would take a significant amount of business time to hire and initiate a new employee. During that time, the rest of the staff would be overworked. This either generates resentment, or requires further compensation on top of the costs of the hiring process. It is in the boss's interest to keep members of her staff happy, just as it is in the employees' interest to keep her happy with their work.
More importantly, the effect you describe still cuts both ways: if a worker is an interchangeable cog in the low-skill job machine, then likewise the machine is interchangeable for the worker. A person who is frivolously let go from McDonald's for the schedule unavailability you cite will have no trouble getting a job at the Burger King across the street. Until McDonald's can feasibly use robots, they still need a human, and therefore that human has a reciprocal relationship with the company, and there is a cost, no matter how much they minimize it, to losing an employee.
A business always needs its employees at least as much as the employees need the business. This is true even if the business has scale on its side, as McDonald's does: if the business can treat its workforce as an aggregate, then the individuals in the workforce need only respond in kind, and transact with the business as a group.
You have the attitude of a serf, or of a "wage slave". Your boss needs you as much as you need him or her; that is the nature of your relationship, and why you are paid money to show up and do your job. It costs money to lose an employee. If a business turns over employees fast enough for long enough, it will die. Sure, many employers can take advantage of the fact they have hundreds of employees, and assign the extra work from a lost employee to other employees, but only so much, and only so often before those employees also leave. This is also why an organized group of workers have power to negotiate with their employer.
There have already been examples of AI that can do reasoning like this. Granted, they were research bots, but they were also a good decade or more ago. Check out SHRDLU and Shakey.
What does "right away" mean? Do you mean "right of way"?
"How do you justify taking that right away?" == "How do you justify taking away that right?" You really couldn't parse that out? I can only assume you're being disingenuous, which doesn't help your cause here.
The government, in a democracy, and especially of such a small area as the town under discussion, just means the way in which all the persons in that area make decisions together. Every one of those persons has individual rights which are inviolable, but there can be some reasonable discussion about the exercise of those rights in a manner most favorable to everyone in the area.
I certainly have the right to throw my food waste in the corner of my yard, against my neighbor's fence, and create a stinking, vermin-infested pile, but what if all of us in the neighborhood got together, hired someone to drive a truck around once a week, pick up the garbage, and dump it in a lot on the edge of town that we all bought together? That might be nicer for everyone, huh? And so we have the Garbage Collection Act 2008, which is just a document that says everyone agrees that they should pack up their garbage into plastic bags and trundle it down to the curb every Tuesday morning. If you don't agree, you can go to the town meeting and argue that it should be some other way.
For larger geographical areas, and more persons, we scale things up (which doesn't work as well as anyone would like). In the U.S.A., we have representatives who go to the "town meeting" on our behalf with other representatives.
So (to finally answer your question) the right of the municipality is just the right of a bunch of persons to come to a civilized agreement about some aspect of their lives together. That's the important part here, "lives together". Persons live in a neighborhod (although you yourself may be a hermit), and the actions each takes, whether they are exercises of rights or not, affect their neighbors, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Government is a method for coming to a series of agreements among persons living around each other to try to minimize the bad.
All of this should be clear to you if you apply your hero's technique of figuring out the fundamentals of philosophy (I am thinking especially of the beginning of her essay "Philosophy: Who Needs It") to your thinking about a bunch of persons living in close proximity, instead of parroting her political views.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding me? You want me to dig up the police logs from Jerusalem, April 0034? Most of the people living there at the time didn't believe in the miracles or the resurrection, or they'd have been Christians too. Go read about the inconsistencies among just the four canonical Gospels, then tell me that no-one changed any of the story.
It was believed by hundreds more, many of whom had no first-hand knowledge.
Sounds like a cool idea for a video game.
Even though you're posting AC and consistently misspelled one of the key words for the topic at hand, you're fairly coherent, so I guess you deserve a brief rebuttal.
That was, in fact, exactly what I was trying to do. The OP was making a blanket statement that the Bible was historically accurate and complete, and I wanted to make the point that there's been a whole goshdarn lot of disagreement over the past three millenia about what belongs in it.
The links to the Islam and Jewish Christians articles may have been misplaced, but the point remains that there were plenty of people in the area at the time who didn't see any reason to believe in the resurrection, and were no doubt writing their own religious texts. The same is true of the Paulicans: it doesn't matter if Paul said something different than what they said. They're an example of resurrection-deniers.
The point is, again, that the Masoretic version and the Septuagint differ, and someone made a choice . There isn't one single version that everyone has always been reading from. And unless I'm mistaken, Protestants use the Masoretic text for the OT.
The reason the canon is the way it is has plenty of politics and power struggles mixed in to it.
You seem to have misread one of those articles. Deuterocanonical books are those that are used by the Catholic Church but which are not a part of the Hebrew Bible. They're canonical. Apocrypha, on the other hand, are not. The KJV (a Protestant Bible) originally included the Catholic Deuterocanonical books under the "Apocrypha" heading.
I'm not claiming to be a Biblical scholar; most of what I sort-of-know is half-remembered from confirmation classes way back when. The point stands, however, that the Bible is neither complete nor entirely historically accurate.
You mean the Council of Trent.
Right. As you so eloquently put it: citation, please. That story, which you have taken from a propaganda film, apparently comes from a single book. I found some sort of a writeup. There's some disagreement at the same site, and not much mention anywhere else.
It's not really a frame-up, though: you're not doing something bad and blaming it on someone else, you're doing a good thing, expecting that there will be improper retaliation, and redirecting that retaliation to where it can't do any harm anyways.
If the management at the poster's company think that someone they fired is "causing trouble" and try to harm that person's ability to get another job (pretty much the only thing they can do to a person who they've fired), the fired person can probably mount a successful lawsuit under federal employment law, and management will know that. On the other hand, management can make life miserable for the poster, still employed at the company, under any number of excuses that the poster would have a hard time proving are retaliatory.
There were plenty of people from the time of Jesus's death through many centuries who denied or argued various aspects of Jesus's humanity, divinity, status as a prophet or the Messiah, and resurrection.
The current Bible canon is only a selection of the books that the Catholic Church decided were the right ones in the 16th century. They also had to select one of at least two available manuscripts for what became the Old Testament. Other denominations have other canons. There's a pile of books that are left out, and some which are left in that have disputed authorship.
A lot of what's in the Bible is historically accurate, some percentage of it is repeated and probably exaggerated, and there's a lot of stuff that was written in the same span of time (anywhere from 10 to 15 centuries) that isn't in there. You are glossing over so much history it's amazing. Just take a look at this one wikipedia page, if nothing else: The Bible and History.
Persons who are citizens of the Federated Republic of Germany are Germans.
Citizens of the People's Republic of China -> Chinese.
Commonwealth of Australia -> Australians.
United Arab Emirates -> Emirati.
Persons who are citizens of the United States of America, despite accusations of chauvinism, are Americans. Citizens of the United Mexican States are Mexicans, not Americans, even though their United States is also located in North America.
It's generally thought polite to let the country itself define its demonym, and that name is not always "geographically correct" (see "Emirati" above).
That just means it's sent to the NSA, not the FBI.
. . .who forward the data to European intelligence agencies, who in turn give a copy to the FBI.
But I wonder if that isn't because most of us in the West have seen enough Eastern-produced (I guess usually Japanese) cartoons, which come with voices and other context, that we can work it out. For me, the "happy eyes" emoticon definitely brings a generic Japanese-made cartoon face to mind, whereas the :-) is a generic bright yellow smiley face. I'm sure that both of these impressions, rather than being inherent in my facial processing, are culturally influenced.
It would not astonish me to learn that such things as fake ATMs were available, essentially, "retail" (or at least "built on demand"). That is to say, there's a technically inclined someone (who probably knows about Defcon, yes), building the machines but then selling them to the person who actually uses them. The seller doesn't put them into use. The buyer might not know any more about the operation of the machine than what it says in the instruction manual that the builder provided.
I don't have any real information, but it seems a plausible scenario to me.
In the US, any idea fixed in a tangible medium, say, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, or posted to an online forum, is in fact, without any further action, copyright of the person who did the fixing.
At least he does such a terrible job of writing that none of us have to worry about him convincing anyone of anything. The grammar is poor, the verbiage clichéd, and the arguments vacuous. It reads like a high-school essay. Doesn't anyone edit his damn submissions?
"Template" in this case may be a poorly-chosen word. It doesn't mean C++ style template, it's more like "Pick from this list the category of app you want to write. Okay, now here's a whole bunch of boilerplate code with 98% of the framework calls you'd have to write already made for you." Then you essentially, yes, just write your OpenGL code (plain C is legal Obj-C), change some arguments in those framework calls, and compile!
Obj-C, btw, isn't too hard to pick up. It only adds one major syntactical feature to C, for calling methods on objects. Lack of automatic garbage collection can be annoying, but learning Apple's frameworks is really the hardest part. Seems to be a good way to make some money on the side these days.
It wasn't the judge's decision. This was a criminal trial involving a jury. The defense convinced the jury that there was a reasonable doubt that the accused was illegally carrying a weapon, and they acquitted him on that charge.
the operator is a trusted entity.
Baloney. The casino trusts me when I'm playing their video poker? They've got cameras watching me, security guards wandering by, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were monitoring the machine itself to make sure I haven't cracked it somehow. ATMs, too: I'm a trusted operator only to the extent that I verify that I have a legitimate claim to access an account. I've got less authority than a non-admin user on a *nix system. When was the last time your ATM let you delete transaction records, or gave you a listing of all the accounts at your bank?
Perfectly true and well-written, but it still doesn't explain a manager's salary being in a different order of magnitude from an engineer's. Everyone has work to do, which impacts everyone else. If management doesn't clear the decks for producers to be able to focus, or if producers don't generate results, or if salesmen fail to acquire new clients, no one eats.
Sure, the owner of a company, and one or two officers at the absolute top, and on whom ultimate responsibility for everything falls, have a greater stake and therefore should get a greater return, but it should still be proportionate and justified.
The phrase "to better say it" is awkward. However, pedantry in the critique of a long, semi-professionally presented, and ostensibly edited, piece of journalism is not the same sin that it is in the context of a Slashdot post. Furthermore, a split infinitive is not always ungrammatical.
Strongly agree. I had to re-read and consciously parse way too many sentences. The two missing possessive apostrophes right in the second sentence really kick things off with a bang, and it doesn't get better. There are several sentences where it is clear that you wrote one thing, changed your mind, and then didn't re-read the result, but left a word dangling from the first version. Poor grammar and sentence structure in a run-of-the-mill /. post is one thing, but this is supposed to be a finished (professional?) piece, and it reads like a high-school essay.
Poor grammar is distracting for someone who knows what you've done wrong but can tease out what you meant to say; that person has to do too much conscious syntactical work while reading, and has difficulty concentrating on the content. For someone who doesn't know what's wrong, the writing is just unclear. That person will not take in what you are trying to communicate. In both cases, you have failed in your objective: to transmit your ideas to another person.
samzenpus gets a big thumbs-down on this one too. This piece (like others before it) was not "edited" in any meaningful sense. Maybe the /. position "editor" should be renamed "story poster".
I sure am a geek, and voting for third parties, as far as I am concerned, is covered by game theory: we have a situation where both of us voting for the third party (cooperating) will result in what we most want, and both of us voting major party (defecting) will result in a worse, but acceptable, outcome. If one of us defects and the other cooperates, we'll both be very very unhappy for four years.
The payoffs look like this: CC > DD > CD > DC. (The last two could be ranked either way: either you feel good for "doing the right thing", so get a little psychological bonus for cooperating, or you feel like an ass for "helping Bush win", in which case DC > CD) It's very important to note that this is not one of the three classic dilemmas for two-choice games, because there's not really any temptation to defect; but feels a little like Chicken, because we both need to trust each other in order to win. There's sort of a phantom temptation.
What is the source of this "phantom" temptation? It's the fact that we don't really believe enough other voters are rational enough to figure this out.
I think the argument you make can be turned on its head: if it is true that some individual knows that everyone else as a group is going to vote for the major party candidate, that individual is perfectly free to vote for the third party without changing the election. As more and more voters make that realization and choice, less and less of the entire group is voting for the major party. At some point, the third party gets more votes than the major party, and then more than the other major party. Right now we are stuck in the middle, with not enough people voting for the third party to make it win.
It's entirely possible that this is an honest problem: each voter may very well be marking the ballot for his or her actually preferred candidate. If there's some majority percentage of the electorate that as a group supports Gore and Nader rather than Bush, but that percentage is likewise split such that Bush is favored by a plurality of the total electorate, then we have either a failure of perception (Gore and Nader supporters are being seen as closer than they actually are), or a failure by the political parties to offer a candidate that actually appeals to a majority of the country. This isn't very likely, however.
What I think is much more likely is a failure of individual voters to understand that it is literally true that they have one vote, and that it counts, and that it is important that they each vote for their honestly preferred candidate. Each individual person has to make that decision, and then everyone will have made that decision.
Your description of low-skill jobs is accurate, but does not apply to a job which requires any sort of training. A person employed at a small business, doing reasonably skilled work, with a few years' experience, could cause serious problems for an employer if he were to suddenly quit. It would take a significant amount of business time to hire and initiate a new employee. During that time, the rest of the staff would be overworked. This either generates resentment, or requires further compensation on top of the costs of the hiring process. It is in the boss's interest to keep members of her staff happy, just as it is in the employees' interest to keep her happy with their work.
More importantly, the effect you describe still cuts both ways: if a worker is an interchangeable cog in the low-skill job machine, then likewise the machine is interchangeable for the worker. A person who is frivolously let go from McDonald's for the schedule unavailability you cite will have no trouble getting a job at the Burger King across the street. Until McDonald's can feasibly use robots, they still need a human, and therefore that human has a reciprocal relationship with the company, and there is a cost, no matter how much they minimize it, to losing an employee.
A business always needs its employees at least as much as the employees need the business. This is true even if the business has scale on its side, as McDonald's does: if the business can treat its workforce as an aggregate, then the individuals in the workforce need only respond in kind, and transact with the business as a group.
You have the attitude of a serf, or of a "wage slave". Your boss needs you as much as you need him or her; that is the nature of your relationship, and why you are paid money to show up and do your job. It costs money to lose an employee. If a business turns over employees fast enough for long enough, it will die. Sure, many employers can take advantage of the fact they have hundreds of employees, and assign the extra work from a lost employee to other employees, but only so much, and only so often before those employees also leave. This is also why an organized group of workers have power to negotiate with their employer.
There have already been examples of AI that can do reasoning like this. Granted, they were research bots, but they were also a good decade or more ago. Check out SHRDLU and Shakey.
Strongly agree. There is no other article found in a google news search for relevant terms. This has a distinct aroma of bovine excrement to me.
What does "right away" mean? Do you mean "right of way"?
"How do you justify taking that right away?" == "How do you justify taking away that right?" You really couldn't parse that out? I can only assume you're being disingenuous, which doesn't help your cause here.
The government, in a democracy, and especially of such a small area as the town under discussion, just means the way in which all the persons in that area make decisions together. Every one of those persons has individual rights which are inviolable, but there can be some reasonable discussion about the exercise of those rights in a manner most favorable to everyone in the area.
I certainly have the right to throw my food waste in the corner of my yard, against my neighbor's fence, and create a stinking, vermin-infested pile, but what if all of us in the neighborhood got together, hired someone to drive a truck around once a week, pick up the garbage, and dump it in a lot on the edge of town that we all bought together? That might be nicer for everyone, huh? And so we have the Garbage Collection Act 2008, which is just a document that says everyone agrees that they should pack up their garbage into plastic bags and trundle it down to the curb every Tuesday morning. If you don't agree, you can go to the town meeting and argue that it should be some other way.
For larger geographical areas, and more persons, we scale things up (which doesn't work as well as anyone would like). In the U.S.A., we have representatives who go to the "town meeting" on our behalf with other representatives.
So (to finally answer your question) the right of the municipality is just the right of a bunch of persons to come to a civilized agreement about some aspect of their lives together. That's the important part here, "lives together". Persons live in a neighborhod (although you yourself may be a hermit), and the actions each takes, whether they are exercises of rights or not, affect their neighbors, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Government is a method for coming to a series of agreements among persons living around each other to try to minimize the bad.
All of this should be clear to you if you apply your hero's technique of figuring out the fundamentals of philosophy (I am thinking especially of the beginning of her essay "Philosophy: Who Needs It") to your thinking about a bunch of persons living in close proximity, instead of parroting her political views.