So, we have one individual producing a blocklist that was temporarily applied to an official website, to remove trolls and hate speech, and it caught some people it definitely should not have. The organization seems embarrassed by it, and deleted it when they shouldn't have. This still doesn't look like an impressive example.
"Bossy" is normally intended as an insult. It gets stuck on women who do things that would rate praise from men. It tends to be used on strong women, not weak ones, and is part of an overall view of things that directly hurts some women and indirectly men. I'd like to see that attitude go away. I fail to see how "let strong women be strong" is part of "tyranny of the weak".
It's good that your wife has no problem handling it, but the attitude can hurt her career even when not used to her face. Catcalls are usually rude, but really have no further effect (unless they are a PTSD trigger on a rape survivor, but that's a special case).
You and I know that there are noisy small idiotic subsets of any group, and that the UK has some stupid laws. I suspect we'd have some comparably stupid laws about speech in the US if we didn't have the First Amendment. We've got enough stupid laws ourselves, but fortunately hate speech crimes are unconstitutional here.
Not having been involved with anything like "don't let X speak here", I'm guessing here, but there may be a perception that inviting someone to speak is seen as an endorsement of sorts. There's quite a few people that I might want to know more about that I wouldn't want to endorse. Just picketing a speaker without doing anything else is a free speech action, showing disapproval. Still, I agree that this is likely to blow over.
Rolls-Royce is not a monopoly. There are other manufacturers of luxury automobiles, and RR doesn't have dominating market share. If Rolls-Royce produced the only really nice cars, they could end up as a monopoly. (In practice, this would mean that other manufacturers would start producing really nice cars, so the monopoly wouldn't last. This isn't the case with Windows.)
Again, "monopoly" is an economic term, not a moral term. It's entirely possible to have a monopoly on something people can do without. The electrical power company is a monopoly, but I don't have to use electricity.
The "starve to death" was in reference to your claim that a company could always go out of business to avoid using Windows. If one manufacturer makes something that is vital to the survival of a business, and there are no alternatives, then there's a monopoly that can't be evaded.
Then you start talking about ways to run Windows, which means that you're still hooked on Windows, and you're going to have to put up with Microsoft.
Health insurance administration is a big cost also.
I'm not saying that it would be easy, but we could arrive at approximate parity with the second-most-expensive by reducing the increase in health care costs, which can't go up faster than total wealth indefinitely.
I also really hate the idea that the US can't do something every other developed country does as a matter of course, so I'm going to look for ways to accomplish it.
There are at least common threads. Narratives will differ. I don't narrate the same things the same way twice.
However, from your "Native American tribes who don't want to hear anything that challenges the established narrative,", I assumed you were referring to some narrative common among the descendants of the people who got here first. The tribes are at least as varied as the dominant US culture, which is one reason I preferred to refer to the Lakota rather than generalized Native American tribes.
Scientific consensus means that pretty much all scientists in a field agree on something. They've been convinced by the evidence. They're usually in a much better position than I am to judge that. If the evidence isn't convincing, there will almost certainly be scientists who aren't convinced.
We pretty much have to take scientific consensus as scientific fact when we're doing things. In the case of climate science, we have a consensus is that global warming is happening, it's driving climate changes that are going to have some seriously bad effects, and that it's primarily caused by people burning fossil fuels. There's no consensus on the details. Given that, should I consider that a good argument in favor of getting off fossil fuels? I know that scientists can find out differently, but I'm occasionally wrong on facts anyway.
There is science nobody really doubts. Physicists are not generally trying to prove that Special Relativity works. (This doesn't stop the occasional reproduction of Michelson-Morley that gets the same result with greater precision.) They use it in their calculations and models. Massive scientific instruments (like the Large Hadron Collider) are designed and built on the assumption of Special Relativity. There was a lot of uninformed speculation about it, but what I mostly read was fear of creating black holes, not pushing particles faster than the speed of light so the magnets wouldn't work right. When they did have strong experimental evidence that neutrinos were going faster than light, they published a paper that basically asked what they did wrong. Is it wrong to consider this "settled science"?
Obviously, settled science can become unsettled fast. Practically nobody doubted that there was such a thing as space and such a thing as time in the Nineteenth Century. I doubt any physicist believes that in the Twenty-First.
Seriously, after consideration I don't see where any of these claims are false. I could well be wrong, in which case I'd appreciate some indication of how.
Compromise is necessary. If you're unwilling to compromise in politics, you're going to lose sooner or later.
Unless I want to give one issue overriding priority, such that I will vote for the one who favors that position despite the fact that he or she wants to do things I consider deeply immoral on all other issues, I have to compromise. Do you think I should vote for a white supremacist who wants to legalize murdering blacks and Muslims and introduce a regressive income tax to be enforced by IRS agents with licenses to kill just because of his or her position on net neutrality?
We have measures adequate to stop another 9/11 attack. We have passengers who expect to die if the terrorists take over, and we have much stronger barriers against getting into the cockpit. It's not happening again.
There's no way on Earth you can use a bomb to fly an airliner into a building like that. You can't threaten someone into a clearly suicidal action by putting them in danger of their lives. You can't blow up the plane so it flies into a building. No way.
So, you're talking about a situation that almost certainly won't happen again, and which can't happen because of the sort of threat we're discussing.
Note that the device that appears to be a laptop (if it is what blew up; last I saw nobody really knew) is not put through any security screening. That would indicate that the terrorists didn't think they could get the bomb through even rather cursory screening, suggesting that the status quo in carry-on luggage is just fine. If there's any lesson to be learned from this, it's to make sure bombs don't get into the secured area without going through security.
Neither do bombs on airliners. What does cause buildings to fall down are terrorists piloting airliners into them, which requires access to the cockpit and acquiescent passengers. We've changed those things, so what's at risk is the airliner and passengers. That's a much smaller risk, but the security theater gets worse and worse.
ISPs don't charge you on a cost-plus basis. They charge people at what they figure is the optimum rate to get the most profit. If they can get paid for preferring Netflix traffic, they will take that money and whatever they can get out of the customers in addition. The result is that it's harder to get non-Netflix traffic for probably the same amount of money.
Net Neutrality is a stupid name. It's really just being a common carrier, which is a term more people understand. It makes people think NN forbids QoS.
Competition would be nice. Right now, there's three ways to get a connection to my house: through the cable company, through the phone company, and wirelessly. I'm fortunate in that I get to pick which of the three I want, although I really don't want the wireless service that's available for other reasons, so I'm basically down to phone company and cable company That's two companies for an evil entrepeneur to bribe. That's not nearly enough competition.
Broadcast television and radio require bandwidth, which is a limited resource. The EM spectrum is regulated precisely because it's a limited public resource. Get off the air and the FCC doesn't have a hold on you anymore.
Learn some statistics, guy. A thousand individuals is a pretty big sample, provided they's no systemic bias. If there is one, a sample size of half the population won't be enough.
A sample has to be big enough to make the chance that the appropriate statistics differ much from the population low enough, and it doesn't matter much what the population size is.
Suppose 60% of the population is of a particular opinion. (Technically, I should work the other way, from sample statistics, but that's more complicated, and this shows the general principle.) Now, suppose we sample ten people at random. The expected number of people who are of that opinion is six, but the standard deviation is about 1.5*, and so it would not surprise us if only four people in the sample had that opinion, since four is only somewhat over one standard deviation from six. (For samples of this size with discrete values, standard deviations aren't nearly as useful as with larger numbers.)
Now, try a thousand people. We've increased the sample size by a factor of 100, and that increases the expected value by 100 and the standard deviation by 10, to about 15. Now, we'd expect six hundred people, and two standard deviations out from the mean gives us 570 to 630. That's about a 98% chance it's 570-600.) We're almost certainly going to get pretty close to the real value no matter what the population size is.
*The expected value, or mean, is the number in the sample times the probability of "yes". The variance is the number in the sample times the probability of "yes" times the probability of "no". The standard deviation, which is a more useful figure for expressing randomness, is the square root of the variance. Figure that one standard deviation from the mean each way gets about two-thirds of the cases, and two gets about 98% of the cases, for most purposes. That will help you understand polls and the like.
Writing and enforcing laws gets complicated. The murder laws for my state are detailed and hard to understand, and enforcement requires a some large government departments. However, I think it a Good Thing that it's illegal for someone to shoot me for no particular reason.
Last time I voted, Net Neutrality wasn't on the ballot. People's names were. I happen to know where some of them stand on NN, but I am concerned with other issues also. In order to get what I most want, I'm willing to compromise on most issues.
If you expect large for-profit corporations to be responsive to citizens, you're crazy. They'll do whatever makes the most profit, unless restrained by government. Large corporations are dysfunctional in the economic sense because they externalize all the costs they possibly can, and they're corrupt in that their actions are influenced by money. and not any idea of the greater good.
This implies that this is typical of Democrats, which it isn't. It is true of some democrats, just like "Republicans want to turn the US into a theocracy", but I suspect OP would reject that statement. There are stupid loudmouths all over any political spectrum you care to devise.
Granting the government fairly broad powers to stop certain unfair business practices can be effective. Not granting the government some regulatory power is often much more dangerous than granting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the details.
So, we have one individual producing a blocklist that was temporarily applied to an official website, to remove trolls and hate speech, and it caught some people it definitely should not have. The organization seems embarrassed by it, and deleted it when they shouldn't have. This still doesn't look like an impressive example.
"Bossy" is normally intended as an insult. It gets stuck on women who do things that would rate praise from men. It tends to be used on strong women, not weak ones, and is part of an overall view of things that directly hurts some women and indirectly men. I'd like to see that attitude go away. I fail to see how "let strong women be strong" is part of "tyranny of the weak".
It's good that your wife has no problem handling it, but the attitude can hurt her career even when not used to her face. Catcalls are usually rude, but really have no further effect (unless they are a PTSD trigger on a rape survivor, but that's a special case).
You and I know that there are noisy small idiotic subsets of any group, and that the UK has some stupid laws. I suspect we'd have some comparably stupid laws about speech in the US if we didn't have the First Amendment. We've got enough stupid laws ourselves, but fortunately hate speech crimes are unconstitutional here.
Not having been involved with anything like "don't let X speak here", I'm guessing here, but there may be a perception that inviting someone to speak is seen as an endorsement of sorts. There's quite a few people that I might want to know more about that I wouldn't want to endorse. Just picketing a speaker without doing anything else is a free speech action, showing disapproval. Still, I agree that this is likely to blow over.
Rolls-Royce is not a monopoly. There are other manufacturers of luxury automobiles, and RR doesn't have dominating market share. If Rolls-Royce produced the only really nice cars, they could end up as a monopoly. (In practice, this would mean that other manufacturers would start producing really nice cars, so the monopoly wouldn't last. This isn't the case with Windows.)
Again, "monopoly" is an economic term, not a moral term. It's entirely possible to have a monopoly on something people can do without. The electrical power company is a monopoly, but I don't have to use electricity.
The "starve to death" was in reference to your claim that a company could always go out of business to avoid using Windows. If one manufacturer makes something that is vital to the survival of a business, and there are no alternatives, then there's a monopoly that can't be evaded.
Then you start talking about ways to run Windows, which means that you're still hooked on Windows, and you're going to have to put up with Microsoft.
Health insurance administration is a big cost also.
I'm not saying that it would be easy, but we could arrive at approximate parity with the second-most-expensive by reducing the increase in health care costs, which can't go up faster than total wealth indefinitely.
I also really hate the idea that the US can't do something every other developed country does as a matter of course, so I'm going to look for ways to accomplish it.
There are at least common threads. Narratives will differ. I don't narrate the same things the same way twice.
However, from your "Native American tribes who don't want to hear anything that challenges the established narrative,", I assumed you were referring to some narrative common among the descendants of the people who got here first. The tribes are at least as varied as the dominant US culture, which is one reason I preferred to refer to the Lakota rather than generalized Native American tribes.
Okay, here's what I'm saying.
Scientific consensus means that pretty much all scientists in a field agree on something. They've been convinced by the evidence. They're usually in a much better position than I am to judge that. If the evidence isn't convincing, there will almost certainly be scientists who aren't convinced.
We pretty much have to take scientific consensus as scientific fact when we're doing things. In the case of climate science, we have a consensus is that global warming is happening, it's driving climate changes that are going to have some seriously bad effects, and that it's primarily caused by people burning fossil fuels. There's no consensus on the details. Given that, should I consider that a good argument in favor of getting off fossil fuels? I know that scientists can find out differently, but I'm occasionally wrong on facts anyway.
There is science nobody really doubts. Physicists are not generally trying to prove that Special Relativity works. (This doesn't stop the occasional reproduction of Michelson-Morley that gets the same result with greater precision.) They use it in their calculations and models. Massive scientific instruments (like the Large Hadron Collider) are designed and built on the assumption of Special Relativity. There was a lot of uninformed speculation about it, but what I mostly read was fear of creating black holes, not pushing particles faster than the speed of light so the magnets wouldn't work right. When they did have strong experimental evidence that neutrinos were going faster than light, they published a paper that basically asked what they did wrong. Is it wrong to consider this "settled science"?
Obviously, settled science can become unsettled fast. Practically nobody doubted that there was such a thing as space and such a thing as time in the Nineteenth Century. I doubt any physicist believes that in the Twenty-First.
Seriously, after consideration I don't see where any of these claims are false. I could well be wrong, in which case I'd appreciate some indication of how.
And this would be relevant...how?
Compromise is necessary. If you're unwilling to compromise in politics, you're going to lose sooner or later.
Unless I want to give one issue overriding priority, such that I will vote for the one who favors that position despite the fact that he or she wants to do things I consider deeply immoral on all other issues, I have to compromise. Do you think I should vote for a white supremacist who wants to legalize murdering blacks and Muslims and introduce a regressive income tax to be enforced by IRS agents with licenses to kill just because of his or her position on net neutrality?
We have measures adequate to stop another 9/11 attack. We have passengers who expect to die if the terrorists take over, and we have much stronger barriers against getting into the cockpit. It's not happening again.
There's no way on Earth you can use a bomb to fly an airliner into a building like that. You can't threaten someone into a clearly suicidal action by putting them in danger of their lives. You can't blow up the plane so it flies into a building. No way.
So, you're talking about a situation that almost certainly won't happen again, and which can't happen because of the sort of threat we're discussing.
The 19th Century terrorist black bombs were cool, too.
White supremacists kill more people than Muslims in the US, last I looked.
Note that the device that appears to be a laptop (if it is what blew up; last I saw nobody really knew) is not put through any security screening. That would indicate that the terrorists didn't think they could get the bomb through even rather cursory screening, suggesting that the status quo in carry-on luggage is just fine. If there's any lesson to be learned from this, it's to make sure bombs don't get into the secured area without going through security.
Neither do bombs on airliners. What does cause buildings to fall down are terrorists piloting airliners into them, which requires access to the cockpit and acquiescent passengers. We've changed those things, so what's at risk is the airliner and passengers. That's a much smaller risk, but the security theater gets worse and worse.
ISPs don't charge you on a cost-plus basis. They charge people at what they figure is the optimum rate to get the most profit. If they can get paid for preferring Netflix traffic, they will take that money and whatever they can get out of the customers in addition. The result is that it's harder to get non-Netflix traffic for probably the same amount of money.
Net Neutrality is a stupid name. It's really just being a common carrier, which is a term more people understand. It makes people think NN forbids QoS.
Competition would be nice. Right now, there's three ways to get a connection to my house: through the cable company, through the phone company, and wirelessly. I'm fortunate in that I get to pick which of the three I want, although I really don't want the wireless service that's available for other reasons, so I'm basically down to phone company and cable company That's two companies for an evil entrepeneur to bribe. That's not nearly enough competition.
Broadcast television and radio require bandwidth, which is a limited resource. The EM spectrum is regulated precisely because it's a limited public resource. Get off the air and the FCC doesn't have a hold on you anymore.
Which would indicate statistical bias, and once more we see that the sample size is big enough, since such bias isn't a problem with the sample size.
Yup. People are working on the Bitcoin Rule to replace the Golden Rule.
Learn some statistics, guy. A thousand individuals is a pretty big sample, provided they's no systemic bias. If there is one, a sample size of half the population won't be enough.
A sample has to be big enough to make the chance that the appropriate statistics differ much from the population low enough, and it doesn't matter much what the population size is.
Suppose 60% of the population is of a particular opinion. (Technically, I should work the other way, from sample statistics, but that's more complicated, and this shows the general principle.) Now, suppose we sample ten people at random. The expected number of people who are of that opinion is six, but the standard deviation is about 1.5*, and so it would not surprise us if only four people in the sample had that opinion, since four is only somewhat over one standard deviation from six. (For samples of this size with discrete values, standard deviations aren't nearly as useful as with larger numbers.)
Now, try a thousand people. We've increased the sample size by a factor of 100, and that increases the expected value by 100 and the standard deviation by 10, to about 15. Now, we'd expect six hundred people, and two standard deviations out from the mean gives us 570 to 630. That's about a 98% chance it's 570-600.) We're almost certainly going to get pretty close to the real value no matter what the population size is.
*The expected value, or mean, is the number in the sample times the probability of "yes". The variance is the number in the sample times the probability of "yes" times the probability of "no". The standard deviation, which is a more useful figure for expressing randomness, is the square root of the variance. Figure that one standard deviation from the mean each way gets about two-thirds of the cases, and two gets about 98% of the cases, for most purposes. That will help you understand polls and the like.
Writing and enforcing laws gets complicated. The murder laws for my state are detailed and hard to understand, and enforcement requires a some large government departments. However, I think it a Good Thing that it's illegal for someone to shoot me for no particular reason.
Last time I voted, Net Neutrality wasn't on the ballot. People's names were. I happen to know where some of them stand on NN, but I am concerned with other issues also. In order to get what I most want, I'm willing to compromise on most issues.
If you expect large for-profit corporations to be responsive to citizens, you're crazy. They'll do whatever makes the most profit, unless restrained by government. Large corporations are dysfunctional in the economic sense because they externalize all the costs they possibly can, and they're corrupt in that their actions are influenced by money. and not any idea of the greater good.
How about the labor union movement? Really, we've had income inequality vary in this country. It isn't monotonically increasing.
Let's look at the offending text:
This implies that this is typical of Democrats, which it isn't. It is true of some democrats, just like "Republicans want to turn the US into a theocracy", but I suspect OP would reject that statement. There are stupid loudmouths all over any political spectrum you care to devise.
GP's point is entirely valid, and has nothing to do with the rackspace dispute. Substitute any other widely used video source and it's just as valid.
Granting the government fairly broad powers to stop certain unfair business practices can be effective. Not granting the government some regulatory power is often much more dangerous than granting it.