I agree with you too, but some companies, such as supermarkets, do have profit margins of about 1% on sales. For publicly traded companies, you can look up their financial statements online. In fact, I recommend it. It's very educational.
You fail to appreciate that most of what keeps humans as well-behaved as most are is FEAR of punishment.
Act out in ape society and you can get bitten. Humans are no different.
The way to deal with brutes is to break them, so break them and do not stop until the enemy either submits or dies.
Thanks for a good example of somebody who got it compleley wrong.
Actually, most of what keeps humans as well-behaved is our natural evolutionary programming to cooperate. Communities in which people ignored social rules didn't survive, while communities in which people did cooperate survived. Cooperation evolved through both cultural and genetic evolution.
People have a strong sense of fairness programmed by evolution. They want people in their community to be fair, and they'll punish people who are unfair -- even if it costs them something to punish those who are unfair.
This has been proven by experimental economics. Look up "Evolution of cooperation" on Wikipedia. They use games based on Prisoner's Dilemma. For example, researchers take a group of six people. They give each subject $10. They set up a game in which they can all contribute $10 to a pot, the researchers contribute another $5, and divide the pot among each of the subjects.
If everybody cooperates and contributes $10, they all come out ahead -- they divide $65 among themselves. But if one person defects, and keeps his $10 out of the pot,they divide $55 among themselves, the one who defected comes out ahead, and everybody who cooperated comes out behind. Cooperation breaks down, everybody keeps their $10, and they're all worse off that they would have been if they cooperated.
Then the researchers set up the game so subjects could *punish* people who defect and freeload. Each subject could pay $1 to take $2 away from the defector.
The researchers found that subjects usually spend their own money to punish people who defect. The defectors start cooperating, everybody contributes money to the pot, they get $65, and come out ahead.
People have a strong sense of fairness programmed by evolution. They want people in their community to be fair, and they'll punish people who are unfair -- even if it costs them more money.
The important message, according to the researchers, is that under these conditions, people want fairness more than they want money. There are good evolutionary reasons why this is true. Von Mises was wrong.
This makes sense in explaining why the lower classes, and even the middle classes, engage in destructive riots like this.
They may feel that society is being unfair to them, so they should be unfair to society in return.
Why shouldn't they use senseless violence against people who have been unfair to them, torment them and exploit them?
After all, *you* want to use senseless violence against *them*.
I don't know, on the basis of scientific evidence, whether this is true, but I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that we should examine on the basis of factual evidence. Sociologists have demonstrated it for race riots in the U.S. It's as good an explanation as the "simply criminal hoodlums" argument.
If an international traveler went through the airport with such a device and didn't speak English, he could wind up in the morgue, if the Boston cops followed their protocol.
A lot of deaf people were killed by cops because they didn't follow spoken orders.
Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.
Well, I agree that you have to be familiar with the basic facts. 7 bullet points are good (in that essay about Max Weber, for example.
There may be some essays that are so highly structured that you could break the information down into machine-scoreable chunks.
But the standard freshman English classical essay is to pick a topic, give the arguments for it, the arguments against it, and come to your own conclusion. The important thing to learn is not a collection of facts, but how to think for yourself and evaluate facts.
Having professors first strictly defining the rules, entering them into software and having a computer evaluate those rules is still "professors grading the essays". It's self evident that the grading is better if it's more strictly defined.
You don't have an obligation to agree with your teacher's ideas, but you do have an obligation to understand them.
Once you understand his ideas, you should be free to prove you understand him by repeating his ideas, then explain your reasons for disagreeing, and come to a conclusion different from his.
It doesn't always happen, but most teachers allow or encourage students to disagree with them, as long as they follow the academic conventions of supporting their arguments with evidence. (And as long as they understand their teacher's ideas in the first place.)
I once failed an essay in freshman English because instead of analyzing the text, I just gave my own ideas and my own arguments. I didn't follow the assignment. I learned a lot from that.
I don't have the facts on your paper so I don't know whether your prof was right or wrong. If he gave you a C because you understood his position and disagreed with him, he's wrong. If he gave you a C because you didn't understand his position in the first place, you're wrong.
Or maybe he just gave you a C because you're not a cute chick. That's been known to happen.
As to whether a computer can be more fair, if it can then you shouldn't be setting an essay. A computer can tell if you've listed a set of bullet points correctly, but it can't judge your understanding of the subject. For example, one of the titles my students could pick was 'Give five design patterns for concurrent programming and suggest when each would be appropriate'. Students got a reasonable mark if they showed me that they understood the materials I'd covered in the lecture. They got a really good mark if they showed me something I hadn't covered in the lecture and demonstrated that they understood it. How would you program a computer to make that call?
I agree. If you look at the example of computer grading in TFA, you'll see that it is in effect a set of bullet points. http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/ It's like a short-answer test with the numbers and paragraph marks deleted and run into a paragraph.
If you're going to use an essay-marking program like this, you might as well give short answer tests.
It's nice to get the date of birth and death in an essay, but today teachers are de-emphasizing facts that you can look up on Wikipedia in favor of more insight.
You learned an important lesson or two. Your TA was an asshole. Just because he's a teacher doesn't mean he's right. Cute chicks win (you did read Anthony and Cleopatra, didn't you?).
We've tried protests. We've tried elections. We've tried global networking. None of them have accomplished their goals in the US (they helped our Egyptian and Tunisian friends quite a bit though). Serious rebellion would be horrific and doomed for failure. I'm out of options, how about you?
Keep fighting.
Find people who understand politics, and learn from them. Before you support somebody, find out what his policies are. Don't fall for glamorous leaders like Obama, just because he's the latest fad.
To a Waverer
Bertolt Brecht
You tell us It looks bad for our cause. The darkness gets deeper. Our strength gets weaker. Now, after we have worked for so many years, We are worse off than in the beginning.
The enemy stands there, stronger than ever before. His powers seem to have grown. He looks invincible. We have made mistakes. There is no denying it. Our numbers are dwindling. Our slogans are in disarray. Many times, The enemy has twisted our words beyond recognition.
But what did we say that was false? Some of it ? All of it ? Whom can we still count on ? Are we just left over, thrown Out of the living stream? Will we remain behind? Understanding no one and understood by none ?
Or do we just have to get lucky ?
This is what you ask. Expect no other answer than your own.
Basic problem is that these are all incremental steps that don't address fundamental problems.
I think most important issue of the Obama presidency was health care.
Obama told us that he supported single payer, and a lot of people voted for him for that reason. When he got into office, the first thing he did was to call a White House health care conference, in which single payer advocates, like John Conyers, were specifically not invited. Then he compromised single payer away, for reasons people disagree on (some say the Republicans forced him to compromise, other people say his campaign contributors in the health care industry forced him to drop it, and other people say this is just the pro-industry position he really wants). He offered us a public *option* instead. Then he compromised the public option away. When progressives from moveon.org actually raised money and bought TV commercials in the districts of conservative Democrats who opposed single payer to encourage them to support what was supposedly Obama's preference, Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retarded" -- and then when it got out, apologized to the *retarded* organizations. As a result, we will continue with the private insurance based system, which will cost us almost twice as much as a single-payer system would have cost us, based on comparisons to the Canadian system, to U.S. Medicare, and the VA system.
I have no more than an informed citizen's knowledge of economics, but Paul Krugman makes a lot of sense to me, and he says that Obama's latest compromise gives away the store to the Republicans, and will cause real damage to Medicare and Social Security over the next few years.
I don't agree with Bardwick on everything, but to take those issues that I know something about:
27. Provided new federal funding for science and research labs.
According to Science magazine and the New Scientist, fededral funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health will be down by something like 4-5%. The NIH is in the process of deciding what worthwhile projects to cut. The Hubble Space Telescope is a cliffhanger.
20. Signed the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act on February 4, 2009, which provides quality health care to 11 million kids – 4 million who were previously uninsured.
Yes, it subsidizes the private insurance industry -- after Obama refused to give us a single payer system, which would have solved this problem at half the cost.
30. Ordered the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and a review of our detention and interrogation policy, and prohibited the use of torture.
Closure of Guantanamo Bay? You're denying the facts.
37. Signed the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act.
The progressives wanted the financial institutions to take a hit and mark the value of the homes down to market rate -- so homeowners could keep their home. This act instead keeps the loans at underwater inflated rates, and just spreads the payments out to infinity, so that people will never pay them off.
55. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with the Geneva Convention standards.
Most of these torture policies are secret, so we don't know what Obama's policy is. But the human rights organizations complain that the Obama administration didn't prosecute any of the people responsible for the torture policy -- so there's no deterrence to doing it again.
I lived through the 60s. It was more than just the war. A lot of people put their lives on the line in ways that had nothing to do with the draft. Their friends were getting killed because they were trying to vote in the south, for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers_murders
Corny as it sounds today, they did it out of a commitment to social justice.
You're right, though. The draft incentivized them to resist the war in Vietnam.
Of course, 3,000 Americans died in an even more senseless war in Iraq. I don't know why that doesn't incentivize kids today to do anything (beyond voting for Obama, which doing nothing).
No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their complicity are bad cops too.
People who are framed by the cops usually go to jail, sometimes to death row.
The cases where innocent people are acquitted are rare, usually the result of an unusual circumstance, like the person who actually did the crime feeling guilty and confessing, or a crime where a DNA test can resolve the facts.
The Innocence Project, which first started freeing people from jail with DNA evidence, said the significance of their acquittals was that they were rare and unusual and they demonstrated that many people were falsely convicted in cases where they *couldn't* be vindicated with DNA evidence -- and they're still in jail.
Worst of all, when cops get caught committing perjury, the prosecutors usually don't prosecute. For example, in New York City, during the Democratic convention, the police arrested demonstrators who were doing nothing illegal -- along with innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with the demonstration -- and gave sworn testimony, under oath, accused them of felony crimes.
One of the defense lawyers got the police's own videos, which clearly showed that the defendants were innocent, and that the cops were committing perjury. But the police department refused to prosecute them for perjury. If it wasn't for that accident of having the videos, these defendants would have had to choose between pleading guilty to a minor crime or (if they had the $50,000 or so for a criminal defense) going to trial and possibly getting convicted of a serious felony.
So the police have strong career (financial) incentives for framing people, and no penalty for lying. What do you think they're going to do?
In order to avoid it, the police managers and elected officials have to make strong efforts to overcome these natural tendencies, and most of them don't do it.
Because it's worked in the past, in various forms, successfully for many years.
There was a group you could join in the 1970s to get your name in a directory of people who would put other people up free, in exchange for reciprocity by somebody else when they were looking for a place to stay -- sort of Craigslist before computers. Great deal if you like to travel and meet people.
That's different from going off and leaving somebody to rent your house in your absence, but there are dangers in having people as guests in your own home.
When I was in college, I was renting a house that I sublet to some physics graduate students for the summer. I had to clean the place up after they left (not malicious, just lazy), but it was worth it for three months rent.
Usually, when you sublet, you check them out. My sub-tenants were students at the same school, and I got them through the school housing office, so they couldn't disapper.
One of the problems in this case is that Airbnb actually makes it more difficult or impossible for you to check the renter out. As several astute/.'rs have pointed out, what exactly is the value-added that this company offers over Craigslist?
I'd like to see a lawyer give an opinion on what liability Airbnb has to this blogger, notwithstanding their boilerplate waivers.
The lawyers are correct. It's not usually cost-effective to sue them.
If Google blocks a lawyer's account, with lots of valuable information, it will be cost-effective to sue them.
I'm making the educational point that as a matter of law, they can have a legal obligation to treat you fairly and you can take them to court to enforce that obligation, if it's important enough.
It sounds like Google is being arbitrary and arrogant about this. They may have to answer in court some day.
IANAL but it's not necessarily true that you have no redress if Google suddenly locked you out for no reason.
You can have a legal claim even if you got something free. The legal textbook example was a high school chemistry teacher who got a display case from a petroleum company, with bottles labeled "crude oil," "gasoline," "kerosine," etc. He needed some kerosine to store sodium metal, so he used the kerosine from the display. It turned out that the bottles weren't accurately labeled. They were just for show. The "kerosine" was actually water. It led to an explosion, severely injuring the teacher, and he sued the petroleum company. He won.
You could say that you made reasonable reliance that Google would let you have those services indefinitely, and by taking those services away arbitrarily, Google caused you damages, both in business and your personal life.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you too, but some companies, such as supermarkets, do have profit margins of about 1% on sales. For publicly traded companies, you can look up their financial statements online. In fact, I recommend it. It's very educational.
You fail to appreciate that most of what keeps humans as well-behaved as most are is FEAR of punishment.
Act out in ape society and you can get bitten. Humans are no different.
The way to deal with brutes is to break them, so break them and do not stop until the enemy either submits or dies.
Thanks for a good example of somebody who got it compleley wrong.
Actually, most of what keeps humans as well-behaved is our natural evolutionary programming to cooperate. Communities in which people ignored social rules didn't survive, while communities in which people did cooperate survived. Cooperation evolved through both cultural and genetic evolution.
People have a strong sense of fairness programmed by evolution. They want people in their community to be fair, and they'll punish people who are unfair -- even if it costs them something to punish those who are unfair.
This has been proven by experimental economics. Look up "Evolution of cooperation" on Wikipedia. They use games based on Prisoner's Dilemma. For example, researchers take a group of six people. They give each subject $10. They set up a game in which they can all contribute $10 to a pot, the researchers contribute another $5, and divide the pot among each of the subjects.
If everybody cooperates and contributes $10, they all come out ahead -- they divide $65 among themselves. But if one person defects, and keeps his $10 out of the pot,they divide $55 among themselves, the one who defected comes out ahead, and everybody who cooperated comes out behind. Cooperation breaks down, everybody keeps their $10, and they're all worse off that they would have been if they cooperated.
Then the researchers set up the game so subjects could *punish* people who defect and freeload. Each subject could pay $1 to take $2 away from the defector.
The researchers found that subjects usually spend their own money to punish people who defect. The defectors start cooperating, everybody contributes money to the pot, they get $65, and come out ahead.
People have a strong sense of fairness programmed by evolution. They want people in their community to be fair, and they'll punish people who are unfair -- even if it costs them more money.
The important message, according to the researchers, is that under these conditions, people want fairness more than they want money. There are good evolutionary reasons why this is true. Von Mises was wrong.
This makes sense in explaining why the lower classes, and even the middle classes, engage in destructive riots like this.
They may feel that society is being unfair to them, so they should be unfair to society in return.
Why shouldn't they use senseless violence against people who have been unfair to them, torment them and exploit them?
After all, *you* want to use senseless violence against *them*.
I don't know, on the basis of scientific evidence, whether this is true, but I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that we should examine on the basis of factual evidence. Sociologists have demonstrated it for race riots in the U.S. It's as good an explanation as the "simply criminal hoodlums" argument.
Be careful when you hold the baby.
If an international traveler went through the airport with such a device and didn't speak English, he could wind up in the morgue, if the Boston cops followed their protocol.
A lot of deaf people were killed by cops because they didn't follow spoken orders.
Obviously it's an empty Altoids can. Everybody knows that empty Altoids cans are used for electronic cases.
What are Altoids used for, anyway?
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/09/mit_student_arr.html
Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.
Law students do that all the time.
It's 7 short-answer questions run together.
A more interesting test would be to write a script to answer the computer-scored questions.
Well, I agree that you have to be familiar with the basic facts. 7 bullet points are good (in that essay about Max Weber, for example.
There may be some essays that are so highly structured that you could break the information down into machine-scoreable chunks.
But the standard freshman English classical essay is to pick a topic, give the arguments for it, the arguments against it, and come to your own conclusion. The important thing to learn is not a collection of facts, but how to think for yourself and evaluate facts.
I can't imagine how a computer could score that.
Maybe Peter Norvig can do it.
I'm a bit puzzled as to how this scheme is supposed to work.
They gave an interactive example.
http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/
Having professors first strictly defining the rules, entering them into software and having a computer evaluate those rules is still "professors grading the essays". It's self evident that the grading is better if it's more strictly defined.
True. If you read the example, you'll see that these "essays" are more like short-answer questions merged into a single paragraph. The program looks for a few pre-determined keywords. http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/
It might be more fun working a few dates and keywords into a paragraph than filling out short-answer questions, but the information is the same.
If it would improve your ability to appreciate the quality of my work, I'd be happy to include a joint in my lab book.
You don't have an obligation to agree with your teacher's ideas, but you do have an obligation to understand them.
Once you understand his ideas, you should be free to prove you understand him by repeating his ideas, then explain your reasons for disagreeing, and come to a conclusion different from his.
It doesn't always happen, but most teachers allow or encourage students to disagree with them, as long as they follow the academic conventions of supporting their arguments with evidence. (And as long as they understand their teacher's ideas in the first place.)
I once failed an essay in freshman English because instead of analyzing the text, I just gave my own ideas and my own arguments. I didn't follow the assignment. I learned a lot from that.
I don't have the facts on your paper so I don't know whether your prof was right or wrong. If he gave you a C because you understood his position and disagreed with him, he's wrong. If he gave you a C because you didn't understand his position in the first place, you're wrong.
Or maybe he just gave you a C because you're not a cute chick. That's been known to happen.
As to whether a computer can be more fair, if it can then you shouldn't be setting an essay. A computer can tell if you've listed a set of bullet points correctly, but it can't judge your understanding of the subject. For example, one of the titles my students could pick was 'Give five design patterns for concurrent programming and suggest when each would be appropriate'. Students got a reasonable mark if they showed me that they understood the materials I'd covered in the lecture. They got a really good mark if they showed me something I hadn't covered in the lecture and demonstrated that they understood it. How would you program a computer to make that call?
I agree. If you look at the example of computer grading in TFA, you'll see that it is in effect a set of bullet points.
http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/ It's like a short-answer test with the numbers and paragraph marks deleted and run into a paragraph.
If you're going to use an essay-marking program like this, you might as well give short answer tests.
It's nice to get the date of birth and death in an essay, but today teachers are de-emphasizing facts that you can look up on Wikipedia in favor of more insight.
You learned an important lesson or two. Your TA was an asshole. Just because he's a teacher doesn't mean he's right. Cute chicks win (you did read Anthony and Cleopatra, didn't you?).
You wouldn't have learned that from a computer.
We've tried protests. We've tried elections. We've tried global networking. None of them have accomplished their goals in the US (they helped our Egyptian and Tunisian friends quite a bit though). Serious rebellion would be horrific and doomed for failure. I'm out of options, how about you?
Keep fighting.
Find people who understand politics, and learn from them. Before you support somebody, find out what his policies are. Don't fall for glamorous leaders like Obama, just because he's the latest fad.
To a Waverer
Bertolt Brecht
You tell us
It looks bad for our cause.
The darkness gets deeper. Our strength gets weaker.
Now, after we have worked for so many years,
We are worse off than in the beginning.
The enemy stands there, stronger than ever before.
His powers seem to have grown. He looks invincible.
We have made mistakes. There is no denying it.
Our numbers are dwindling.
Our slogans are in disarray. Many times,
The enemy has twisted our words beyond recognition.
But what did we say that was false?
Some of it ? All of it ?
Whom can we still count on ? Are we just left over, thrown
Out of the living stream? Will we remain behind?
Understanding no one and understood by none ?
Or do we just have to get lucky ?
This is what you ask.
Expect no other answer than your own.
— 1935
I call troll from this cut and paste job....
Definitely cut and paste, maybe troll.
Basic problem is that these are all incremental steps that don't address fundamental problems.
I think most important issue of the Obama presidency was health care.
Obama told us that he supported single payer, and a lot of people voted for him for that reason. When he got into office, the first thing he did was to call a White House health care conference, in which single payer advocates, like John Conyers, were specifically not invited. Then he compromised single payer away, for reasons people disagree on (some say the Republicans forced him to compromise, other people say his campaign contributors in the health care industry forced him to drop it, and other people say this is just the pro-industry position he really wants). He offered us a public *option* instead. Then he compromised the public option away. When progressives from moveon.org actually raised money and bought TV commercials in the districts of conservative Democrats who opposed single payer to encourage them to support what was supposedly Obama's preference, Rahm Emanuel called them "fucking retarded" -- and then when it got out, apologized to the *retarded* organizations. As a result, we will continue with the private insurance based system, which will cost us almost twice as much as a single-payer system would have cost us, based on comparisons to the Canadian system, to U.S. Medicare, and the VA system.
I have no more than an informed citizen's knowledge of economics, but Paul Krugman makes a lot of sense to me, and he says that Obama's latest compromise gives away the store to the Republicans, and will cause real damage to Medicare and Social Security over the next few years.
I don't agree with Bardwick on everything, but to take those issues that I know something about:
27. Provided new federal funding for science and research labs.
According to Science magazine and the New Scientist, fededral funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health will be down by something like 4-5%. The NIH is in the process of deciding what worthwhile projects to cut. The Hubble Space Telescope is a cliffhanger.
20. Signed the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act on February 4, 2009, which provides quality health care to 11 million kids – 4 million who were previously uninsured.
Yes, it subsidizes the private insurance industry -- after Obama refused to give us a single payer system, which would have solved this problem at half the cost.
30. Ordered the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and a review of our detention and interrogation policy, and prohibited the use of torture.
Closure of Guantanamo Bay? You're denying the facts.
37. Signed the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act.
The progressives wanted the financial institutions to take a hit and mark the value of the homes down to market rate -- so homeowners could keep their home. This act instead keeps the loans at underwater inflated rates, and just spreads the payments out to infinity, so that people will never pay them off.
55. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with the Geneva Convention standards.
Most of these torture policies are secret, so we don't know what Obama's policy is. But the human rights organizations complain that the Obama administration didn't prosecute any of the people responsible for the torture policy -- so there's no deterrence to doing it again.
Voting for Obama is doing nothing.
Did Google actually respond to the subpoena and disclose the guy's name?
Or did Google's lawyers tell them where to go? I read the subpoena on the TV station's web site, and it was absurd on its face.
I lived through the 60s. It was more than just the war. A lot of people put their lives on the line in ways that had nothing to do with the draft. Their friends were getting killed because they were trying to vote in the south, for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers_murders
Corny as it sounds today, they did it out of a commitment to social justice.
You're right, though. The draft incentivized them to resist the war in Vietnam.
Of course, 3,000 Americans died in an even more senseless war in Iraq. I don't know why that doesn't incentivize kids today to do anything (beyond voting for Obama, which doing nothing).
No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their complicity are bad cops too.
People who are framed by the cops usually go to jail, sometimes to death row.
The cases where innocent people are acquitted are rare, usually the result of an unusual circumstance, like the person who actually did the crime feeling guilty and confessing, or a crime where a DNA test can resolve the facts.
The Innocence Project, which first started freeing people from jail with DNA evidence, said the significance of their acquittals was that they were rare and unusual and they demonstrated that many people were falsely convicted in cases where they *couldn't* be vindicated with DNA evidence -- and they're still in jail.
Worst of all, when cops get caught committing perjury, the prosecutors usually don't prosecute. For example, in New York City, during the Democratic convention, the police arrested demonstrators who were doing nothing illegal -- along with innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with the demonstration -- and gave sworn testimony, under oath, accused them of felony crimes.
One of the defense lawyers got the police's own videos, which clearly showed that the defendants were innocent, and that the cops were committing perjury. But the police department refused to prosecute them for perjury. If it wasn't for that accident of having the videos, these defendants would have had to choose between pleading guilty to a minor crime or (if they had the $50,000 or so for a criminal defense) going to trial and possibly getting convicted of a serious felony.
So the police have strong career (financial) incentives for framing people, and no penalty for lying. What do you think they're going to do?
If you look at Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment you'll see that it's almost inevitable for the police to turn into sadistic bullies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
In order to avoid it, the police managers and elected officials have to make strong efforts to overcome these natural tendencies, and most of them don't do it.
Because it's worked in the past, in various forms, successfully for many years.
There was a group you could join in the 1970s to get your name in a directory of people who would put other people up free, in exchange for reciprocity by somebody else when they were looking for a place to stay -- sort of Craigslist before computers. Great deal if you like to travel and meet people.
That's different from going off and leaving somebody to rent your house in your absence, but there are dangers in having people as guests in your own home.
When I was in college, I was renting a house that I sublet to some physics graduate students for the summer. I had to clean the place up after they left (not malicious, just lazy), but it was worth it for three months rent.
Usually, when you sublet, you check them out. My sub-tenants were students at the same school, and I got them through the school housing office, so they couldn't disapper.
One of the problems in this case is that Airbnb actually makes it more difficult or impossible for you to check the renter out. As several astute /.'rs have pointed out, what exactly is the value-added that this company offers over Craigslist?
I'd like to see a lawyer give an opinion on what liability Airbnb has to this blogger, notwithstanding their boilerplate waivers.
Are you seriously proposing that the GOP has something siginficant to say about science, as in contributions?
They once did. I admit it was over 30 years ago.
The lawyers are correct. It's not usually cost-effective to sue them.
If Google blocks a lawyer's account, with lots of valuable information, it will be cost-effective to sue them.
I'm making the educational point that as a matter of law, they can have a legal obligation to treat you fairly and you can take them to court to enforce that obligation, if it's important enough.
It sounds like Google is being arbitrary and arrogant about this. They may have to answer in court some day.
IANAL but it's not necessarily true that you have no redress if Google suddenly locked you out for no reason.
You can have a legal claim even if you got something free. The legal textbook example was a high school chemistry teacher who got a display case from a petroleum company, with bottles labeled "crude oil," "gasoline," "kerosine," etc. He needed some kerosine to store sodium metal, so he used the kerosine from the display. It turned out that the bottles weren't accurately labeled. They were just for show. The "kerosine" was actually water. It led to an explosion, severely injuring the teacher, and he sued the petroleum company. He won.
You could say that you made reasonable reliance that Google would let you have those services indefinitely, and by taking those services away arbitrarily, Google caused you damages, both in business and your personal life.
Or you know... you can instead memorize HOW to do multiplication instead of memorizing the fact of 6*6 = 36...
6*6 = (5+1)*6 = 30+6 = 36.
Easy.