Perhaps they do not support the cause but do support the right of the people to vote on it. Good luck trying to explain THAT distinction to anyone who is so passionate about the cause that they are going to look at this website to see which of their neighbors are the supposed "bad guys".
My point is that you, as a man, are probably not an able judge of what is sexist and what is not. (Maybe YOU are, but this isn't personal. I'm talking about men generally.)
Why not? Seems to me a man has a brain between his ears just like a woman does. Surely that brain is capable of analyzing a situation to determine whether something is sexist. To say that men (generally) are incapable of such a things seems... sexist.
Any individual is allowed to be offended by anything. When you deny that they should be offended, you are basically dissing their point of view. That's not constructive.
Sure, anyone is allowed to be offended. And someone else is allowed to be offended by the first person taking offense at an innocent remark. So we can all get offended, and nobody will be any better off.
The question we should be asking ourselves is at what point does "taking offense" cease being a useful tool against bad behavior, and degenerate into bad behavior itself?
There's an old rule of thumb in life to never attribute to malice what can be explained by an innocent mistake. The corollary is never to attribute to bias what can be explained by an honest miscommunication. Following this rule is the way to be constructive.
We do nobody any favors by encouraging them to interpret others' comments in the least favorable, rather than the most favorable, way. All it does is damage their social interactions with good people, and create a death spiral in which their accusations of bias to well-meaning people earn them the very enmity they were worried about.
But let's admit that for generations (if not forever) men have been forcing their understanding on women, without allowing much in the other direction
There is no doubt that in the past, society has had failings in terms of allowing women equal roles in things like politics and the workplace.
That said, I think it's a misunderstanding of the power dynamic between men and women to say "without allowing much in the other direction". Women shape the behavior of both men and women far more than men do. They just do it in less overt ways, through social ostracism and criticism rather than through force. Even in these supposedly patriarchal western societies, you'll find it's women being the enforcers of the societal status quo.
When women were expected to stay at home, many of the sharpest criticism of working women came from other women. These days when women are expected to work, the sharpest criticism of stay-at-home moms comes from - you guessed it- other women.
What men wear is shaped by women. What women wear is, unless she's on a date, also largely shaped by what other women would think of her. If a woman wears something revealing or simply unfashionable, most men won't care and almost certainly won't say anything negative. But she may well get crucified by other women, and odds are she'll "correct" herself next time.
And to this day, while gaining increased roles in formerly male-dominated realms, women expect to (and usually do) maintain their dominance in traditionally female realms, such as family and child-rearing matters, what type of home to get, etc.
How often do you see a man get custody of his kids in a divorce, unless the woman is a heroin addict or a convicted murderer?
When two underage teenagers have consensual sex, how often do you see the female of the pair charged with statutory rape instead of the male?
Society's history is far more complex than just a tale of men dominating women. Women's exercises of power seem to be less noticed (perhaps because it's often done with more skill and less bluster).
If your point is that the decision process is by nature an inexact and somewhat subjective art, I would certainly agree.
I don't think you can codify these things much beyond what Nobel put in his will.
That said, my subjective opinion is that it would be quite a stretch to say that the relatively small substantive foreign policy changes made thus far by Obama qualify as the "best" work for promoting peace of fraternity among nations. YMMV.
the larger issue is that as a man you have no *inherent* frame of reference by which to decide whether they are right or wrong or how serious or trivial it is.
This is exactly the issue - namely that the criterion you're using is that if some woman somewhere dislikes something a man says, and calls "sexism", that makes the man sexist and there is no way for him to rebut the claim. I call bullshit. Adopting that line of thinking creates a race to the bottom in which any easily-offended person gets to define anything that bothers them as socially unacceptable speech. It's nonsense and an insult to those who care about REAL sexism.
Claims of sexism need to be based upon societally-agreed upon criteria. Statements denigrating women? Sure. Treating a woman as an object? Sure. Merely offending somebody? No way.
We need to have some sense and understanding for each other, men and women alike. If some guy says he has a hard time explaining his work to prospective dates, let's have some sympathy for the dude. If a woman talks about how it's hard to get guys to understand what she tells them, let's have some sympathy for her. Let's not label them sexist because somebody might concoct an offensive explanation of their words.
Yeah, it's amazing how defensive people get when their character is being assassinated.
Let me try a parable here.
Suppose you're a nice person, an upstanding member of the community. Maybe you even work in some altruistic job to help at-risk kids learn to read.
Now I come along and accuse you of being a child molester. I then say "and of course every child molester is going to deny it - they don't want to go to jail. And we all know that our society has a problem with child molestation." Yet I offer no evidence of any act committed by you, simply the fact that some people in society, at some points in time, have molested children.
Would you not feel defensive at the accusation? Would you not deny it?
Would you not worry that some people might start to treat you as suspect?
Would you not try to understand why a total stranger would be accusing you of something so horrible?
It seems to me you would do all of these things. It seems to me you would be fairly justified in thinking that your accuser is unhinged or has an agenda.
While accusations of sexism are not as serious as accusations of pedophilia, smears have consequences and people care about their reputation. When others start slinging mud, they're going to get upset.
Why should the "uniform and predictable" response of the unfairly accused be so "astonishing" to you?
But we already change criminal sentences based on motivation. A crime of passion is not considered as serious as a premeditated murder. Someone who kills in a fit of rage and jealousy is less likely to do it again than someone who plans a murder in cold blood and carries it out. With hate crimes, we know the person is potentially more dangerous in the future, as their motivation to kill minorities is not likely to just go away.
That is the first time I've heard anyone give a logical justification for hate crimes legislation. So thanks.
But if likelihood of re-offending is the justification for hate crimes laws, it seems wrong to me that you have to be a member of a Congressionally-approved group for your murder to be considered evidence of likelihood to reoffend. If someone murders me because they thought I was flirting with their girlfriend, that guy is likely to reoffend too. If he kills me because I bumped into him walking on a crowded street, he's likely to do that again too. But we don't apply extra penalties for that.
If the goal is to lock up those who are likely to reoffend, why don't we make that part of the sentencing criteria? Doing this "hate crimes" stuff seems like a poor way to solve the problem since it doesn't cover all sorts of circumstances.
And now we've gotten ourselves into the business of saying a murder isn't as bad as another if it wasn't committed against a politically-protected group. That doesn't seem right. If someone murders my friend, it doesn't hurt any less because they weren't on Congress's list of protected groups.
Are you arguing that black criminals do more harm to society than white criminals?
No.
Or are you arguing that we simply can't compare the amount of damage done, and therefore it is as ludicrous to say that whites do more than blacks as it is to say that blacks do more than whites?
Essentially. If you really wished to attribute a damage measurement by race, you would have to do it on the basis of each type of crime. I don't think any unified measure that combines all crimes would make sense, because some crimes are not comparable to others.
I would also ask what the goal of the comparison by race is. To me, having a "which race does more damage" question does no good to society - it's just going to inflame people.
If OTOH the goal is to identify at-risk communities so as to target public policies to help those communities reduce crime, then looking at the demographics for a given type of crime (say murder, or fraud, or whatever) could provide insight. But you would have to look at all sorts of demographics - not just race - to tease out what the cause and effect relationships may be.
But as I have previously pointed out, that's what the Nobel Peace Prize has been since the first prize was awarded. Someone can't win the peace prize unless that person acts in a certain way that promotes the Foundation's political view point and goals. Correct?
To the extent that promoting peace in the world involves a political viewpoint that peace and international cooperation is good, then of course you are correct.
But Nobel's will stated that the Prize should go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." That is a narrowly defined set of activities to honor. My contention is the Foundation in recent years has expanded its criteria beyond Nobel's criteria into more generic political concerns.
The awardees during most of its existence matched Nobel's description well - things like founding international arbitration leagues, the League of Nations, disarmament conferences, origination of the Marshall Plan, campaigns against nuclear weapons, and the peaceful end to apartheid.
In recent years we've gotten things like advocating aggressive efforts against climate change. Regardless of the merits of the cause, that has little to do with peace. And now they've given a Prize simply because Obama got himself elected.
According to the Washington Post, the deficit tripled. The factors they cited were the drop in tax revenues from the recession, the bailouts, the stimulus, and increased unemployment benefits.
So the coward was off a bit, but not much.
While we're on the subject, what has people all worked up is not so much the present-year's deficit (which is somewhat expected due to the recession) but the 10-year Congressional Budget Office projections of Obama's proposed budget. See graphic. According to that, Obama's budget, if passed, would rack up huge deficits even after the economy recovers, resulting in over $9 trillion in new debt.
Obama is NOT a leftist, he is a slightly left leaning moderate.
Based purely upon his speeches, that would be true. That view is why the man got elected with huge popularity among independents.
But actions are a truer guide to any President's political inclinations than are his words. And it's too early to see whether Obama's actions will match his words.
So far, his support of the health bills written in the House by far-left committee chairmen are not encouraging for those who thought they elected a moderate. But as I said, it's too early to tell.
Of course the Nobel Foundation is perfectly within their rights to aware their prize to whoever they wish. Nobody's saying they can't.
Folks are simply pointing out that by turning a once deeply-respected "Peace Prize" into a prize for "Politics With Which The Committee Happens to Agree", they cheapen the value of the prize. That mild criticism in no way undermines anyone's right.
And this cheapening is not new - they've been going down that unfortunate road for years. Picking a President who's so early in his term that he hasn't had a chance to enact any of his initiatives just makes the farce even more obvious.
Even the recipient seemed embarrassed by it (to Obama's credit).
Governments are elected to serve their people. The US President is no different than other nations' heads of state in that regard.
And I find it interesting how so many people remember everything we do that they didn't like, but so quickly forget the good.
They remember that we invaded Iraq without full support from the members of the Security Council. Yet they forget we freed the Iraqi people from a tyranny that regularly raped and murdered its citizens, dumping their bodies in mass graves, and twice attacked its neighbors.
They forget the US military's aid to tsunami victims abroad, our protection of much of the world against threats from their neighbors, and our funding of vast portions of the United Nations budget.
The US government did all of those good things and more while acting in the interests of the United States. To say that our government acting in our interests is at best a neutral thing misunderstands the nature of human relationships. Acting in one's own interest often helps others too.
How exactly do you propose we "add up" the "damage to people's lives"?
Suppose one criminal kills my friend or family member. A different criminal embezzles money from my employer, thus preventing my employer from giving me a Christmas bonus. How do we add those? Does the embezzlement count as a murder? A half? A tenth?
It's ridiculous to compare vastly different categories of crime in such a way. Speaking of incarceration rates for each given offense would make more sense.
I wish more of our politicians understood the point you just made about the effects of our society's skin-color-based benefit-giving.
The direct recipients may benefit at first. But not everyone gets them, and the practice hurts everyone of the same color who has to endure people wondering whether they got where they are based on their accomplishments, or based on some racial scholarship or employment scheme.
While I, an "overrepresented" white guy in engineering, generally thinks "white privilege" is nonsense, I wouldn't trade everyone second-guessing my accomplishments for the scholarship money I might've gotten by being a different color.
Maybe someday society will wise up and we can stop putting people in these bad situations.
My view is a bit different although I think you're close. I'm not counting Apple out but my reasons are different.
The touch screen, accelerometer, music store, etc. are all things other phones have. Some phones even do some of those things really well. But the iPhone was the one that did them all really well, and did them first. So even though other phones have comparable hardware, few have the same polish and none have Apple's first-mover advantage.
What remains to be seen is whether the first-mover advantage will be enough for them, as the competition increasingly has feature parity and possibly lower cost. On the one hand, a widely available application base was hugely valuable for computers, and phones are increasingly just ultra-portable computers. On the other hand, most of the apps most people would want on a phone, aside from perhaps games, IMO are already available on competitors like the Pre (and Palm's tiny app store is just a faint shadow of Apple's).
The other thing not to forget is the Apple has formidable marketing skills, and that matters a lot. These are the folks who managed to create and sustain an almost fanatical loyalty among their Macintosh customers, even during a period of years when the Mac was technically inferior to other companies' offerings. If they can do something similar with the iPhone, which at present is king of the hill, they'll do quite well.
The problem is that the bills are being voted on so fast (thousand-plus pages to begin with, and then hundreds of pages of amendments) that even the staff does not have time to understand all the changes and brief the lawmaker thoroughly.
Of course friends influence you. But if your friends decide to rob a liquor store, your individual choice is whether or not to participate. Unfortunately, sometimes people will make the wrong choice. It doesn't mean we don't hold them responsible for their choice.
Of course we are influenced by physical cues too. Murder rates go up in the summer. Doesn't mean we say that "the summer made me do it".
Now, overeating is neither robbery nor homicide. And I'm not saying we should go around vilifying people for it (lord knows that most years of my life I've been overweight and sometimes downright fat). But it really is a matter of individual choices, and we should educate people on how they can help themselves, and hold them responsible for the cost of their actions.
If your health insurance premium was a function of whether you're trying to take care of yourself or not, then we'd be holding people responsible without having to make it into a moral crusade. Whereas if you are subsidizing my behavior through health insurance or whatever, then you do have a legitimate interest in my eating habits. That's not the society I want. We should all be free to do what we wish and to bear the responsibility for those choices.
You're correct that we are paying the consequences, but it's so indirectly that nobody feels the linkage and thus nobody's motivated to change their behavior.
If I rack up reckless driving tickets, my insurance premium then skyrockets. I can easily see the cause and effect, and the prospect of not paying so much money is motivation not to drive like an idiot. If however I eat recklessly, my insurance premium doesn't change noticeably as a result.
The health premiums do go up a lot each year, but that's (mostly) from *everyone else* eating recklessly too. Even if I become a health nut my insurance costs won't change. Now, if everyones' insurance companies gave discounts for safe eating, like car companies do for safe driving, maybe you'd start to see a change.
Any of these items consumed in moderation is not imposing costs on society, unlike your tobacco example. It's the consumption in excess of practically every food item out there (except maybe brussel sprouts) that's making the country fat and driving up health care problems and costs.
There's no use punishing the people who enjoy soda but don't drink a gallon of it a day. If we insist on going down this route, why don't they propose taxing the actual problem - obesity? If you had to pay a tax for every pound overweight you were, that would incentivize the desired behavior far more than a "sin tax" on various products.
The irony is that in many states, food purchases are tax-exempt because we used to worry about poor people not being able to afford food. Now we're worried about poor and rich alike eating too much.
It would require a massive conspiracy, like none we have ever seen.
Not really, all it would require is a few people in the right places in a couple of high-market-share manufacturers. If you built something into the tools used by those manufacturers, it could be transparent.
Also, you don't need to own every device. You could choose to target critical infrastructure devices - say a router, switch, DPI equipment or whatever. Something that handles lots of traffic and thus is well-positioned for either intelligence collection or denial/disruption of service.
Apple, Dell, etc. are not so incompetent in their QA that they would not know that the hardware is somehow phoning home.
Maybe it only phones home after receiving some sort of signal (such as a predetermined sequence of packets, packets with certain formatting, etc). QA testing is unlikely to uncover something like that, and even if they do may have a hard time reproducing it (which may make them less likely to pursue it).
The sum of the worlds nerds are not so dumb that they would not notice all hardware phoning home.
As above, it doesn't have to be all hardware, nor so stupid as to phone home regularly, or even without receiving an activation signal. That would attract unnecessary attention.
Also, if you're targeting infrastructure devices, they handle so much traffic that it seems possible one could slip in some extra transmissions out without notice.
It is too expensive to bug every machine, natural competition would favor companies who do not install this extra stuff.
Competition favors those with the most capability for the lowest price. An intelligently designed surveillance or disruption module would not degrade capability during normal operation. It would be a sleeper agent until triggered.
The marginal cost of another copy of software is zero. And the initial development cost would likely be picked up by the intelligence agency, not the company that was infiltrated. So the presence of such equipment would have no effect on competition.
And if the company management was aware of the operation, they could even be given secret subsidies by the government to make them more competitive in the marketplace by artificially lowering the cost of their products. This would help ensure success of the trojan.
China would face political ruin by trying to pull a stunt like this if it was discovered that they were spying on the world.
How would anyone know the software was government-created, and not just one of the many unfortunate cases of malware infections we've seen at OEMs in the past?
I'm not saying China or anyone else is necessarily doing any of this stuff. But it wouldn't surprise me. Nations do a lot worse in the world of espionage.
I know the value of being adaptable. I understand that a well-rounded liberal arts education can help you develop that flexibility. In fact, I very much enjoyed receiving a well-rounded education during my college years, and it's served me well in engineering and in life.
I also do not see a conflict between receiving such an education, and obtaining a body of knowledge that one can use professionally.
All I was asking is that proponents of liberal education make their case for it, as you just did very well, rather than condescend to those who might not understand its full value at first glance.
Because when you're 17 years old, and trying to figure out why you should spend more money than you've ever seen in your life on an education, it's not an unreasonable question to ask how studying Charlemagne is of any benefit. You answered it well - I just wish more people would.
I wasn't complaining about anything. I think that universities by and large have been adapting just fine, and I agree that plenty of us have succeeded with the system.
My post was simply intended to make a general point, which was to refute the parent post's idea that utility of an education was unrelated to its value. I was simply pointing out that most people go to college precisely to gain marketable skills, which means a practical education (compared with the parent post's example of learning about Charlemagne) is important. That's true not just for vocational training, but also the professionals being educated in traditional 4-year universities and even graduate schools.
Now, more to the point of the main article... obviously the buyer has to have some sense. Job markets change. Job opportunities are a function not only of the market, and the education, but also the quality of the individual. If the student gets a low GPA (as the girl in the article did), it's not a surprise she's having a hard time finding a job. Maybe she should have studied harder instead of suing her school.
Although a key to gainful, professional employment may be a classic liberal education, it does not therefore stand that the objective of this education is commercial marketability of graduates. Nor is the measure of education's success the commercial placement of these graduates.
Universities are selling a product. As with any merchant, their success is measured by their ability to provide a service that people want at a price they are willing to pay, while making a profit at it.
The thing is, their customer base has changed radically over the years. Society now requires an increasing number of specialized and intellectually demanding skills. Universities are, whether we like it or not, the place where those skills are bought and sold. This has transformed the university from a playground for the wealthy (who need not care about mundane things like employability) to the gateway to a decent career path for a huge segment of society.
This transformation means employment is now THE critical aspect of this education, not the well-rounded liberal arts education that was the goal of its former customer base. Universities know this well, which is why they market themselves with an eye towards their customers' future career prospects.
That's not to say that people don't care about the liberal arts aspect. We do... but for most university students, it's no longer the driving force behind undergraduate education. Few are willing to put themselves into years' worth of debt simply to become a more well-rounded individual. They do it so they can have a better career and quality of life. The liberal part of the education is simply a bonus.
It's just a case of balancing the breadth of a liberal education with the depth of an employable career discipline. That way we get an education that is both liberal and useful.
"Why do I have to learn about Charlemagne!? Who cares!"
Well, I needn't bother to refute the type of vapid ignorance and pathetic intellectual narcissism represented by that incurious statement.
And I needn't bother to refute the arrogance that assumes everyone should simply hand over their hard-earned money for a class without an explanation of why it's worth the cost. It is incumbent on the seller of a product to make its value clear, not a potential buyer. The annals of history are littered with defunct businesses whose clearly wonderful products could find no buyers.
It's not badmouthing someone to point out that a particular style of communication may undermine your efforts. Most people are not computer geeks are are not aware of this particular piece of geek history. So they will view something like "Micro$oft" as simple name--calling, which is generally considered juvenile and will thus undermine any other arguments you make (even if you happen to be right).
Assuming that you care about persuading people of Microsoft's bad behavior, or persuading people of the merits of FOSS, then avoiding such terminology is good advice. On the other hand, if your goal is simply to express your disdain for Microsoft, by all means call them Microshaft or Micro$oft all you'd like. Different tools for different jobs.
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Perhaps they do not support the cause but do support the right of the people to vote on it. Good luck trying to explain THAT distinction to anyone who is so passionate about the cause that they are going to look at this website to see which of their neighbors are the supposed "bad guys".
My point is that you, as a man, are probably not an able judge of what is sexist and what is not. (Maybe YOU are, but this isn't personal. I'm talking about men generally.)
Why not? Seems to me a man has a brain between his ears just like a woman does. Surely that brain is capable of analyzing a situation to determine whether something is sexist. To say that men (generally) are incapable of such a things seems ... sexist.
Any individual is allowed to be offended by anything. When you deny that they should be offended, you are basically dissing their point of view. That's not constructive.
Sure, anyone is allowed to be offended. And someone else is allowed to be offended by the first person taking offense at an innocent remark. So we can all get offended, and nobody will be any better off.
The question we should be asking ourselves is at what point does "taking offense" cease being a useful tool against bad behavior, and degenerate into bad behavior itself?
There's an old rule of thumb in life to never attribute to malice what can be explained by an innocent mistake. The corollary is never to attribute to bias what can be explained by an honest miscommunication. Following this rule is the way to be constructive.
We do nobody any favors by encouraging them to interpret others' comments in the least favorable, rather than the most favorable, way. All it does is damage their social interactions with good people, and create a death spiral in which their accusations of bias to well-meaning people earn them the very enmity they were worried about.
But let's admit that for generations (if not forever) men have been forcing their understanding on women, without allowing much in the other direction
There is no doubt that in the past, society has had failings in terms of allowing women equal roles in things like politics and the workplace.
That said, I think it's a misunderstanding of the power dynamic between men and women to say "without allowing much in the other direction". Women shape the behavior of both men and women far more than men do. They just do it in less overt ways, through social ostracism and criticism rather than through force. Even in these supposedly patriarchal western societies, you'll find it's women being the enforcers of the societal status quo.
When women were expected to stay at home, many of the sharpest criticism of working women came from other women. These days when women are expected to work, the sharpest criticism of stay-at-home moms comes from - you guessed it- other women.
What men wear is shaped by women. What women wear is, unless she's on a date, also largely shaped by what other women would think of her. If a woman wears something revealing or simply unfashionable, most men won't care and almost certainly won't say anything negative. But she may well get crucified by other women, and odds are she'll "correct" herself next time.
And to this day, while gaining increased roles in formerly male-dominated realms, women expect to (and usually do) maintain their dominance in traditionally female realms, such as family and child-rearing matters, what type of home to get, etc.
How often do you see a man get custody of his kids in a divorce, unless the woman is a heroin addict or a convicted murderer?
When two underage teenagers have consensual sex, how often do you see the female of the pair charged with statutory rape instead of the male?
Society's history is far more complex than just a tale of men dominating women. Women's exercises of power seem to be less noticed (perhaps because it's often done with more skill and less bluster).
If your point is that the decision process is by nature an inexact and somewhat subjective art, I would certainly agree.
I don't think you can codify these things much beyond what Nobel put in his will.
That said, my subjective opinion is that it would be quite a stretch to say that the relatively small substantive foreign policy changes made thus far by Obama qualify as the "best" work for promoting peace of fraternity among nations. YMMV.
the larger issue is that as a man you have no *inherent* frame of reference by which to decide whether they are right or wrong or how serious or trivial it is.
This is exactly the issue - namely that the criterion you're using is that if some woman somewhere dislikes something a man says, and calls "sexism", that makes the man sexist and there is no way for him to rebut the claim. I call bullshit. Adopting that line of thinking creates a race to the bottom in which any easily-offended person gets to define anything that bothers them as socially unacceptable speech. It's nonsense and an insult to those who care about REAL sexism.
Claims of sexism need to be based upon societally-agreed upon criteria. Statements denigrating women? Sure. Treating a woman as an object? Sure. Merely offending somebody? No way.
We need to have some sense and understanding for each other, men and women alike. If some guy says he has a hard time explaining his work to prospective dates, let's have some sympathy for the dude. If a woman talks about how it's hard to get guys to understand what she tells them, let's have some sympathy for her. Let's not label them sexist because somebody might concoct an offensive explanation of their words.
Yeah, it's amazing how defensive people get when their character is being assassinated.
Let me try a parable here.
Suppose you're a nice person, an upstanding member of the community. Maybe you even work in some altruistic job to help at-risk kids learn to read.
Now I come along and accuse you of being a child molester. I then say "and of course every child molester is going to deny it - they don't want to go to jail. And we all know that our society has a problem with child molestation." Yet I offer no evidence of any act committed by you, simply the fact that some people in society, at some points in time, have molested children.
Would you not feel defensive at the accusation? Would you not deny it?
Would you not worry that some people might start to treat you as suspect?
Would you not try to understand why a total stranger would be accusing you of something so horrible?
It seems to me you would do all of these things. It seems to me you would be fairly justified in thinking that your accuser is unhinged or has an agenda.
While accusations of sexism are not as serious as accusations of pedophilia, smears have consequences and people care about their reputation. When others start slinging mud, they're going to get upset.
Why should the "uniform and predictable" response of the unfairly accused be so "astonishing" to you?
But we already change criminal sentences based on motivation. A crime of passion is not considered as serious as a premeditated murder. Someone who kills in a fit of rage and jealousy is less likely to do it again than someone who plans a murder in cold blood and carries it out. With hate crimes, we know the person is potentially more dangerous in the future, as their motivation to kill minorities is not likely to just go away.
That is the first time I've heard anyone give a logical justification for hate crimes legislation. So thanks.
But if likelihood of re-offending is the justification for hate crimes laws, it seems wrong to me that you have to be a member of a Congressionally-approved group for your murder to be considered evidence of likelihood to reoffend. If someone murders me because they thought I was flirting with their girlfriend, that guy is likely to reoffend too. If he kills me because I bumped into him walking on a crowded street, he's likely to do that again too. But we don't apply extra penalties for that.
If the goal is to lock up those who are likely to reoffend, why don't we make that part of the sentencing criteria? Doing this "hate crimes" stuff seems like a poor way to solve the problem since it doesn't cover all sorts of circumstances.
And now we've gotten ourselves into the business of saying a murder isn't as bad as another if it wasn't committed against a politically-protected group. That doesn't seem right. If someone murders my friend, it doesn't hurt any less because they weren't on Congress's list of protected groups.
Are you arguing that black criminals do more harm to society than white criminals?
No.
Or are you arguing that we simply can't compare the amount of damage done, and therefore it is as ludicrous to say that whites do more than blacks as it is to say that blacks do more than whites?
Essentially. If you really wished to attribute a damage measurement by race, you would have to do it on the basis of each type of crime. I don't think any unified measure that combines all crimes would make sense, because some crimes are not comparable to others.
I would also ask what the goal of the comparison by race is. To me, having a "which race does more damage" question does no good to society - it's just going to inflame people.
If OTOH the goal is to identify at-risk communities so as to target public policies to help those communities reduce crime, then looking at the demographics for a given type of crime (say murder, or fraud, or whatever) could provide insight. But you would have to look at all sorts of demographics - not just race - to tease out what the cause and effect relationships may be.
But as I have previously pointed out, that's what the Nobel Peace Prize has been since the first prize was awarded. Someone can't win the peace prize unless that person acts in a certain way that promotes the Foundation's political view point and goals. Correct?
To the extent that promoting peace in the world involves a political viewpoint that peace and international cooperation is good, then of course you are correct.
But Nobel's will stated that the Prize should go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." That is a narrowly defined set of activities to honor. My contention is the Foundation in recent years has expanded its criteria beyond Nobel's criteria into more generic political concerns.
The awardees during most of its existence matched Nobel's description well - things like founding international arbitration leagues, the League of Nations, disarmament conferences, origination of the Marshall Plan, campaigns against nuclear weapons, and the peaceful end to apartheid.
In recent years we've gotten things like advocating aggressive efforts against climate change. Regardless of the merits of the cause, that has little to do with peace. And now they've given a Prize simply because Obama got himself elected.
According to the Washington Post, the deficit tripled. The factors they cited were the drop in tax revenues from the recession, the bailouts, the stimulus, and increased unemployment benefits.
So the coward was off a bit, but not much.
While we're on the subject, what has people all worked up is not so much the present-year's deficit (which is somewhat expected due to the recession) but the 10-year Congressional Budget Office projections of Obama's proposed budget. See graphic. According to that, Obama's budget, if passed, would rack up huge deficits even after the economy recovers, resulting in over $9 trillion in new debt.
Obama is NOT a leftist, he is a slightly left leaning moderate.
Based purely upon his speeches, that would be true. That view is why the man got elected with huge popularity among independents.
But actions are a truer guide to any President's political inclinations than are his words. And it's too early to see whether Obama's actions will match his words.
So far, his support of the health bills written in the House by far-left committee chairmen are not encouraging for those who thought they elected a moderate. But as I said, it's too early to tell.
Of course the Nobel Foundation is perfectly within their rights to aware their prize to whoever they wish. Nobody's saying they can't.
Folks are simply pointing out that by turning a once deeply-respected "Peace Prize" into a prize for "Politics With Which The Committee Happens to Agree", they cheapen the value of the prize. That mild criticism in no way undermines anyone's right.
And this cheapening is not new - they've been going down that unfortunate road for years. Picking a President who's so early in his term that he hasn't had a chance to enact any of his initiatives just makes the farce even more obvious.
Even the recipient seemed embarrassed by it (to Obama's credit).
Governments are elected to serve their people. The US President is no different than other nations' heads of state in that regard.
And I find it interesting how so many people remember everything we do that they didn't like, but so quickly forget the good.
They remember that we invaded Iraq without full support from the members of the Security Council. Yet they forget we freed the Iraqi people from a tyranny that regularly raped and murdered its citizens, dumping their bodies in mass graves, and twice attacked its neighbors.
They forget the US military's aid to tsunami victims abroad, our protection of much of the world against threats from their neighbors, and our funding of vast portions of the United Nations budget.
The US government did all of those good things and more while acting in the interests of the United States. To say that our government acting in our interests is at best a neutral thing misunderstands the nature of human relationships. Acting in one's own interest often helps others too.
How exactly do you propose we "add up" the "damage to people's lives"?
Suppose one criminal kills my friend or family member. A different criminal embezzles money from my employer, thus preventing my employer from giving me a Christmas bonus. How do we add those? Does the embezzlement count as a murder? A half? A tenth?
It's ridiculous to compare vastly different categories of crime in such a way. Speaking of incarceration rates for each given offense would make more sense.
I wish more of our politicians understood the point you just made about the effects of our society's skin-color-based benefit-giving.
The direct recipients may benefit at first. But not everyone gets them, and the practice hurts everyone of the same color who has to endure people wondering whether they got where they are based on their accomplishments, or based on some racial scholarship or employment scheme.
While I, an "overrepresented" white guy in engineering, generally thinks "white privilege" is nonsense, I wouldn't trade everyone second-guessing my accomplishments for the scholarship money I might've gotten by being a different color.
Maybe someday society will wise up and we can stop putting people in these bad situations.
My view is a bit different although I think you're close. I'm not counting Apple out but my reasons are different.
The touch screen, accelerometer, music store, etc. are all things other phones have. Some phones even do some of those things really well. But the iPhone was the one that did them all really well, and did them first. So even though other phones have comparable hardware, few have the same polish and none have Apple's first-mover advantage.
What remains to be seen is whether the first-mover advantage will be enough for them, as the competition increasingly has feature parity and possibly lower cost. On the one hand, a widely available application base was hugely valuable for computers, and phones are increasingly just ultra-portable computers. On the other hand, most of the apps most people would want on a phone, aside from perhaps games, IMO are already available on competitors like the Pre (and Palm's tiny app store is just a faint shadow of Apple's).
The other thing not to forget is the Apple has formidable marketing skills, and that matters a lot. These are the folks who managed to create and sustain an almost fanatical loyalty among their Macintosh customers, even during a period of years when the Mac was technically inferior to other companies' offerings. If they can do something similar with the iPhone, which at present is king of the hill, they'll do quite well.
The problem is that the bills are being voted on so fast (thousand-plus pages to begin with, and then hundreds of pages of amendments) that even the staff does not have time to understand all the changes and brief the lawmaker thoroughly.
Of course friends influence you. But if your friends decide to rob a liquor store, your individual choice is whether or not to participate. Unfortunately, sometimes people will make the wrong choice. It doesn't mean we don't hold them responsible for their choice.
Of course we are influenced by physical cues too. Murder rates go up in the summer. Doesn't mean we say that "the summer made me do it".
Now, overeating is neither robbery nor homicide. And I'm not saying we should go around vilifying people for it (lord knows that most years of my life I've been overweight and sometimes downright fat). But it really is a matter of individual choices, and we should educate people on how they can help themselves, and hold them responsible for the cost of their actions.
If your health insurance premium was a function of whether you're trying to take care of yourself or not, then we'd be holding people responsible without having to make it into a moral crusade. Whereas if you are subsidizing my behavior through health insurance or whatever, then you do have a legitimate interest in my eating habits. That's not the society I want. We should all be free to do what we wish and to bear the responsibility for those choices.
You're correct that we are paying the consequences, but it's so indirectly that nobody feels the linkage and thus nobody's motivated to change their behavior.
If I rack up reckless driving tickets, my insurance premium then skyrockets. I can easily see the cause and effect, and the prospect of not paying so much money is motivation not to drive like an idiot. If however I eat recklessly, my insurance premium doesn't change noticeably as a result.
The health premiums do go up a lot each year, but that's (mostly) from *everyone else* eating recklessly too. Even if I become a health nut my insurance costs won't change. Now, if everyones' insurance companies gave discounts for safe eating, like car companies do for safe driving, maybe you'd start to see a change.
Any of these items consumed in moderation is not imposing costs on society, unlike your tobacco example. It's the consumption in excess of practically every food item out there (except maybe brussel sprouts) that's making the country fat and driving up health care problems and costs.
There's no use punishing the people who enjoy soda but don't drink a gallon of it a day. If we insist on going down this route, why don't they propose taxing the actual problem - obesity? If you had to pay a tax for every pound overweight you were, that would incentivize the desired behavior far more than a "sin tax" on various products.
The irony is that in many states, food purchases are tax-exempt because we used to worry about poor people not being able to afford food. Now we're worried about poor and rich alike eating too much.
It would require a massive conspiracy, like none we have ever seen.
Not really, all it would require is a few people in the right places in a couple of high-market-share manufacturers. If you built something into the tools used by those manufacturers, it could be transparent.
Also, you don't need to own every device. You could choose to target critical infrastructure devices - say a router, switch, DPI equipment or whatever. Something that handles lots of traffic and thus is well-positioned for either intelligence collection or denial/disruption of service.
Apple, Dell, etc. are not so incompetent in their QA that they would not know that the hardware is somehow phoning home.
Maybe it only phones home after receiving some sort of signal (such as a predetermined sequence of packets, packets with certain formatting, etc). QA testing is unlikely to uncover something like that, and even if they do may have a hard time reproducing it (which may make them less likely to pursue it).
The sum of the worlds nerds are not so dumb that they would not notice all hardware phoning home.
As above, it doesn't have to be all hardware, nor so stupid as to phone home regularly, or even without receiving an activation signal. That would attract unnecessary attention.
Also, if you're targeting infrastructure devices, they handle so much traffic that it seems possible one could slip in some extra transmissions out without notice.
It is too expensive to bug every machine, natural competition would favor companies who do not install this extra stuff.
Competition favors those with the most capability for the lowest price. An intelligently designed surveillance or disruption module would not degrade capability during normal operation. It would be a sleeper agent until triggered.
The marginal cost of another copy of software is zero. And the initial development cost would likely be picked up by the intelligence agency, not the company that was infiltrated. So the presence of such equipment would have no effect on competition.
And if the company management was aware of the operation, they could even be given secret subsidies by the government to make them more competitive in the marketplace by artificially lowering the cost of their products. This would help ensure success of the trojan.
China would face political ruin by trying to pull a stunt like this if it was discovered that they were spying on the world.
How would anyone know the software was government-created, and not just one of the many unfortunate cases of malware infections we've seen at OEMs in the past?
I'm not saying China or anyone else is necessarily doing any of this stuff. But it wouldn't surprise me. Nations do a lot worse in the world of espionage.
last I checked, the US higher education system was the envy of the world.
It's the K-12 system that's screwed up.
I think you misunderstood me.
I know the value of being adaptable. I understand that a well-rounded liberal arts education can help you develop that flexibility. In fact, I very much enjoyed receiving a well-rounded education during my college years, and it's served me well in engineering and in life.
I also do not see a conflict between receiving such an education, and obtaining a body of knowledge that one can use professionally.
All I was asking is that proponents of liberal education make their case for it, as you just did very well, rather than condescend to those who might not understand its full value at first glance.
Because when you're 17 years old, and trying to figure out why you should spend more money than you've ever seen in your life on an education, it's not an unreasonable question to ask how studying Charlemagne is of any benefit. You answered it well - I just wish more people would.
I wasn't complaining about anything. I think that universities by and large have been adapting just fine, and I agree that plenty of us have succeeded with the system.
My post was simply intended to make a general point, which was to refute the parent post's idea that utility of an education was unrelated to its value. I was simply pointing out that most people go to college precisely to gain marketable skills, which means a practical education (compared with the parent post's example of learning about Charlemagne) is important. That's true not just for vocational training, but also the professionals being educated in traditional 4-year universities and even graduate schools.
Now, more to the point of the main article... obviously the buyer has to have some sense. Job markets change. Job opportunities are a function not only of the market, and the education, but also the quality of the individual. If the student gets a low GPA (as the girl in the article did), it's not a surprise she's having a hard time finding a job. Maybe she should have studied harder instead of suing her school.
Although a key to gainful, professional employment may be a classic liberal education, it does not therefore stand that the objective of this education is commercial marketability of graduates. Nor is the measure of education's success the commercial placement of these graduates.
Universities are selling a product. As with any merchant, their success is measured by their ability to provide a service that people want at a price they are willing to pay, while making a profit at it.
The thing is, their customer base has changed radically over the years. Society now requires an increasing number of specialized and intellectually demanding skills. Universities are, whether we like it or not, the place where those skills are bought and sold. This has transformed the university from a playground for the wealthy (who need not care about mundane things like employability) to the gateway to a decent career path for a huge segment of society.
This transformation means employment is now THE critical aspect of this education, not the well-rounded liberal arts education that was the goal of its former customer base. Universities know this well, which is why they market themselves with an eye towards their customers' future career prospects.
That's not to say that people don't care about the liberal arts aspect. We do... but for most university students, it's no longer the driving force behind undergraduate education. Few are willing to put themselves into years' worth of debt simply to become a more well-rounded individual. They do it so they can have a better career and quality of life. The liberal part of the education is simply a bonus.
It's just a case of balancing the breadth of a liberal education with the depth of an employable career discipline. That way we get an education that is both liberal and useful.
"Why do I have to learn about Charlemagne!? Who cares!"
Well, I needn't bother to refute the type of vapid ignorance and pathetic intellectual narcissism represented by that incurious statement.
And I needn't bother to refute the arrogance that assumes everyone should simply hand over their hard-earned money for a class without an explanation of why it's worth the cost. It is incumbent on the seller of a product to make its value clear, not a potential buyer. The annals of history are littered with defunct businesses whose clearly wonderful products could find no buyers.
It's not badmouthing someone to point out that a particular style of communication may undermine your efforts. Most people are not computer geeks are are not aware of this particular piece of geek history. So they will view something like "Micro$oft" as simple name--calling, which is generally considered juvenile and will thus undermine any other arguments you make (even if you happen to be right).
Assuming that you care about persuading people of Microsoft's bad behavior, or persuading people of the merits of FOSS, then avoiding such terminology is good advice. On the other hand, if your goal is simply to express your disdain for Microsoft, by all means call them Microshaft or Micro$oft all you'd like. Different tools for different jobs.