Medical records are confidential. It is likely that a journalist could not fact-check this.
They wouldn't have needed to go through her medical records to expose her claims. As soon as they called the doctors and hospitals she claimed to have been treated at, and had been told that they had no records of such a patient, that should have been their first obvious clue. Had the media that hyped her story bothered to place a single call her story would've been easily exposed as an obvious sham. This wasn't an elaborate lie - it was full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and the most fundamental facts about it were unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
That there are people who are willing to lie, even if their lies cause suffering to others, does not surprise me in the list.
What concerns me is the media's role in all this, who for the most part accepted her story without any questions or fact checking. There were so many inconsistencies in her story that even the most basic background check should have exposed her. I'm shocked that no one tried to even talk to her doctors to follow up on her medical claims, for example. Or a quick phone call to the charities she claimed to be supporting would have also exposed her charitable claims.
Her claims should never have been allowed to stand as long they did.
Writing a strongly worded email may feel good, but it will just get re-directed to a spam filter and deleted. Plus, mountains of emails are mostly invisible to the national media.
If Americans really believe in this issue and want things to change, you need more than armchair protesting by letter-writing. You need large-scale protests in the street. Get a million people out in the streets of major cities, and those types of crowds won't be able to be ignored by the media or your elected representatives.
It's not about the can tabs per se. The can tabs have changed often enough in design that the can tab design can be used to date sites from recent history. Their historical artifact status also makes them a useful proxy to protect sites like campgrounds or festival sites that otherwise have little in the way of artifacts. Both of these properties make them useful in dealing with recent historical sites from the last 50 years in both North America and Europe.
The problem is, as the article noted, is that the surge pricing is fluctuating too much for it to be predictable and for drivers to adapt their habits accordingly. When the surge price is fluctuating from 1x to 2.5x the price and back to 1x in the span of a few minutes, as noted in the article, it's not predictable enough for one to add more cars to the road. The best one can do as a driver is take advantage of those surges by taking the most expensive fares possible - which means those with short routes and inexpensive fares are actually seeing their wait time increase despite an increase in surge pricing.
If Uber tweaked its algorithm so that the surge pricing was based less on instantaneous demand, and more on long term trends - so that for example at rush hour prices reliably rose every week - then you might see more drivers getting to the road at those times to take advantage of it.
It moves current drivers from one side of town to the other. It does not put new drivers on the road.
His analysis shows that the surge pricing is not increasing the number of drivers working, it is only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another. This means that the unexpected side-effect noted in the article is that in some neighbourhoods the wait time actually increases along with the surge price increase.
I'm not against a market-oriented approach of surge-pricing to solve a supply need, but the way it is implemented by Uber the prices are changing too fast to serve as a meaningful incentive, so without an increase in drivers you're only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another and aggravating the problem in certain places.
And this why the Mars One mission would never work - putting together people who are committed to dying in a distant planet far from any of their loved ones would make for the worst type crewmates you'd want together in a mission.
And if you read about the 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal, you'll see that it failed because for it to be pulled off it required a half-dozen people to be involved in the conspiracy, which made it very likely that someone would be careless and talk. There were multiple security precautions, and overcoming them all involved multiple people and left a very easily traceable chain of evidence back to the perpetrator.
With the computer RNG, there was a single point of failure that could be overcome by a single well connected person, without any physical record except circumstantial evidence. I'd say the 1980 case, if anything proved how difficult it is to tamper with the spinning ball system without getting caught.
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
And the main reason flight 1549 landed perfectly in the Hudson river was due to the A320's fly-by-wire system, which allowed the pilot to maintain aircraft nose up and as low a speed as possible for landing without stalling. He had to maintain a fine line between gliding in slow enough to avoid injuries and not stalling, and without the onboard computer this would have been a difficult maneuver for a human pilot to accomplish with his workload.
I think if one is a depressed anything at all they should not be allowed to control the fate of hundreds of people. If a doctor finds any hint of depression then the airline and maybe FAA should be notified. Fuck doctor patient confidentiality when peoples' lives are directly at stake.
The likely reason the co-pilot hid his depression was due to the stigma that mental illness carries. If companies end up instituting a policy that people with signs of mental illness be immediately fired, it will end up stigmatizing them further. Instead of trying to seek treatment for their problems, pilots with depression will just hide their issues. Particularly if you get rid of doctor-patient confidentiality, as it would mean a pilot seeking treatment would be reported by the very person supposed to be helping them and might lose their jobs.
As an life-long anglo-Quebec resident, I feel I have to respond this unfair characterization of our province that you and many others outside of here have:
In Quebec they choose to actively suppress English and promote French... the the extent you can't have English signage unless it's smaller than French, and they've ever tried to get companies like Best Buy and Home Depot to change to French names,
Most of us anglo-Quebecers are actually at ease with the fact that French is the dominant language and we need to adapt ourselves to it. I just consider a matter of common courtesy and politeness to make an effort to communicate with your neighbour. Sure, we will whine about the ridiculousness of the language police at times, but not many people argue with the principle of the language laws in trying to build a common society
Quebec are a bunch of whiny assholes, who increasingly are trying to pass laws which actively discriminate against anybody who isn't white, French, and Catholic -- to the extent that they want to ban religious symbols, unless of course it's a cross, and then it's OK.
We had a democratic debate on the matter, and showing that despite your characterization the overwhelming majority of Quebeckers, 75% of them, voted against the party that proposed to ban religious symbols. Showing that we're more tolerant than most of the US, we're legislators in Indiana made discrimination against minorities legal, or in Europe, where bans against religious headgear are part of the law in France. Quebec, on the other hand, has had an openly gay head of government, has a permissive attitude towards weed where it is openly smoked alongside cops in our parks (come to Montreal's park Mont Royal on a Sunday if you don't believe me), and brothels (aka massage parlors) openly advertise their storefronts downtown.
They think they're preserving their culture... when their "culture" is bigotry, a ruined version of the language, and a sense of entitlement mixed in with being whiny cunts.
And then you finish your rant with a bigoted racist attack against la belle province. If you really want to find bigotry, look in the mirror.
How much do these cost compared to FEMA trailers? As maligned as the FEMA trailers are, I suspect the reason they are widely used in disasters is because they are cheap and can therefore be deployed in large quantities. Sure you could do something of higher quality, but if it raises their unit cost it will significantly affect the ability to widely deploy enough shelter in an affected area. Having a low cost solution that can be deployed in large numbers may be more important than quality in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
We sort of cover this in the US with points; you can't just drive recklessly and pay for it out of petty cash forever because you'll lose your license. But the day fine concept seems like a decent way to instill the same kind of aversion in everyone, fairly. Points are ephemeral but your money is obvious.
Except that rich people usually have drivers, and so whether you instill points or day fines they'll be mostly unaffected. At most, their driver may lose their license, in which case they'll just hire another one.
Rich people drive only as a form of entertainment and pleasure, and they can always take out their supercars to private racing tracks where a driving license is not a requirement.
The concept itself is deeply flawed. If you were a crewmember, would you entrust your safety to fellow crewmembers whose primary qualification is that they are willing to die (i.e. exhibit suicidal tendencies) ? There is a reason NASA carries out extensive psychological testing among its applicants. If you're going to entrust a multi-year multi-multi-billion dollar mission in the hands of a select group of people, you want those people to have strong survival insticts that will push them to do everything possible to overcome adversity to come out alive. You do not want people who are willing to give up on life.
Slander laws exist in almost every country, including the United States. And what the contractor said went beyond a simple rant - he implored other contractors not to work with the firm in question (thereby causing commercial harm to the company) and used racist language in his diatribe. If I went on a similar rant against an American company that resulted in a substantial loss of revenue for that company because of my allegations, I would very likely also be sued. The difference is that US courts have a higher standard to meet in a defamation suit, but given the loss of revenue and the racist diatribe even under US standards this contractor would be in hot water.
You're misconstruing the argument in the article. They're not saying that we should try to whitewash people who have done bad things, and a person's bad reputation may often be well deserved. They're warning against falling into the trap of, once someone happens into bad circumstances, of creating a narrative for that person that tries to assign their circumstances as a predestined result of fate. The most insidious example I see of this is when someone contracts a serious disease such as cancer. Often the first questions asked by medical staff are regarding their lifestyle choices, which builds into the narrative that they're sick because of the way they lived.
During the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, for example, the first questions asked to those diagnosed were often whether they lived a promiscuous lifestyle, took drugs, or engaged in gay sex. All activities which were frowned upon, and fed into the dominant societal narrative at the time that the people who were contracting AIDS were losers who contracted the disease because of their loser lifestyle. I'd argue in that case the loser edit was applied to a whole category of people, and held back progress in addressing a serious health issue.
If he can get a guarantee that the trial will be an public and open trial, and not done through a closed and secret military court, I think it can actually be a brilliant tactic. An open trial would force the government to air its eavesdropping activities out in the open. It could perhaps bring some judicial accountability by forcing them to defend the constitutionality of their activities.
However, that's all a big if, and I'm doubtful the government would agree to have Snowden tried in public court outside of a military court.
Isn't the process used laser metal sintering? There's no need to use trendy buzzwords ("3-d printing") that give the false impression that this is a new technique that a hobbyist could do in his basement, when really this is just a variation of a well established industrial process, that requires large industrial tooling.
So OpenStreetMaps is only now adding a basic mapping feature that's been available in other sites for over 10 years now, and somehow we're supposed to get excited about it? To me this is only highlighting how far behind a lot of the open source software is compared to commercially available applications.
You be real. One religion in recent history has been responsible for the vast vast majority of religious inspired violence
While this may be true for events of the last 15 years, this hasn't always been the case for even very recent history
During the 90s, most suicide bombings worldwide were being carried out by a primarily Hindu group (Tamil Tigers) and christian-on-christian religious violence in Northern Ireland would go on to kill more people than died in the 9/11 attacks
During the 70s, terrorism was mostly politically motivated, with far-right and far-left groups carrying out hundreds of bombings. Italy suffered through the Years of Lead, with several thousand people dying in bombings. In Germany, far-left groups like the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells carried out more than 300 bombings alone.
During the 50s, it was primarily nationalist and anti-colonial in nature. Guerrila groups resisting colonialism in Asia and Africa were the primary instigators then.
And go back to the 1920s, and you see radical Anarchists as the main culprits (e.g. see the 1919 Anarchist bombings in the US)
Saying that muslims are responsible for a majority of terrorism is a myopic view of contemporary history - the nature of terrorism has varied greatly with each generation. In another generation we'll likely be looking at another ideology or group to lay blame on.
Using satellite and radar images to identify archaeological sites from space isn't new. But while this method may help in identifying sites of interest, actually identifying Genghis Khan's tomb would require archaeologists to dig at each of those sites. And until an archaeologist is on the ground, the images may just be a peculiarly shaped hill mound.
So if the concerns is identify Genghi's tomb while respecting Mongolian reverence for burial sites, I don't see how this does that, as you'd still need archaeological digging to get useful science from the field.
they'll be using photo analysis algorithms to detect how intoxicated you were in the photo and suggest that you not post it
... Except that most of the time the people taking those photos are posting them while they are intoxicated, and therefore the suggestion not to post won't have any effect
My impression is the regret in taking these drunken pictures happens years after the fact, when the drunken college scene has been left behind, and the poster now has a family and a 9-to-5 job and they want to distance themselves from that past. Trying to tell college students that they shouldn't be posting inappropriate pictures of themselves drinking is futile, the warning will be completely ignored.
I'd say we had minority governments in Canada where third parties played a significant role, so their impact can't be neglected.
The other advantage of first-past-the-post system is that every voter within an electoral district has a clearly defined representative to represent and defend the interests of that constituency. A representative is elected to represent a particular district, and not just the voters who voted for him or her. In a proportional system, there is no guarantee of representation. If one votes for a third party that does not manage to elect any members, one is left without representation. And even if members of your party are elected, they may not elect members from your area. This lack of representation is the biggest flaw in the proportional representation system, in my opinion.
Start using a democratic system where every vote is equal, it's called Proportional Representation and works very well.
It would also be the end of the two party systems.
We have first past the post system here in Canada and we still manage to elect strong third parties. In fact we have 6 federal parties with elected members. In the last 20 years, we've also gone through 6 official opposition parties at the federal level. At the provincial level, the story is similar. Other countries with a first past the post system, such as the UK, also have strong third parties, so that's not the issue.
I'd also gerrymandering is a more of a symptom of a democratic deficit in US politics than a cause. The idea behind gerrymandering is to create "safe" electoral districts. Safe electoral districts are not usually stable here in Canada because it creates an easy opening for third party candidates. Voters in a strongly liberal district can vote for a liberal alternative without risk of a conservative candidate winning - likewise for a strongly conservative district. One should never have districts where one side wins with over 90% of the votes, as happens in numerous republican and democratic districts alike in the US, as that speaks to the lack of a democratic alternative at a local level in those districts.
While they may never find what happened to MH370, the search for it is leading to detailed mapping of an area of the ocean floor that was little explored. And now we're getting better mathematical models of the ocean currents. So while I know there's been a lot of criticism of continuing what seems like a fruitless search, the money isn't being wasted.
We may never find what happened to that aircraft, but we will have expanded our oceanographic knowledge of that area immensely.
Slashdot Mirror
Medical records are confidential. It is likely that a journalist could not fact-check this.
They wouldn't have needed to go through her medical records to expose her claims. As soon as they called the doctors and hospitals she claimed to have been treated at, and had been told that they had no records of such a patient, that should have been their first obvious clue. Had the media that hyped her story bothered to place a single call her story would've been easily exposed as an obvious sham. This wasn't an elaborate lie - it was full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and the most fundamental facts about it were unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
That there are people who are willing to lie, even if their lies cause suffering to others, does not surprise me in the list.
What concerns me is the media's role in all this, who for the most part accepted her story without any questions or fact checking. There were so many inconsistencies in her story that even the most basic background check should have exposed her. I'm shocked that no one tried to even talk to her doctors to follow up on her medical claims, for example. Or a quick phone call to the charities she claimed to be supporting would have also exposed her charitable claims.
Her claims should never have been allowed to stand as long they did.
Writing a strongly worded email may feel good, but it will just get re-directed to a spam filter and deleted. Plus, mountains of emails are mostly invisible to the national media.
If Americans really believe in this issue and want things to change, you need more than armchair protesting by letter-writing. You need large-scale protests in the street. Get a million people out in the streets of major cities, and those types of crowds won't be able to be ignored by the media or your elected representatives.
It's not about the can tabs per se. The can tabs have changed often enough in design that the can tab design can be used to date sites from recent history. Their historical artifact status also makes them a useful proxy to protect sites like campgrounds or festival sites that otherwise have little in the way of artifacts. Both of these properties make them useful in dealing with recent historical sites from the last 50 years in both North America and Europe.
The problem is, as the article noted, is that the surge pricing is fluctuating too much for it to be predictable and for drivers to adapt their habits accordingly. When the surge price is fluctuating from 1x to 2.5x the price and back to 1x in the span of a few minutes, as noted in the article, it's not predictable enough for one to add more cars to the road. The best one can do as a driver is take advantage of those surges by taking the most expensive fares possible - which means those with short routes and inexpensive fares are actually seeing their wait time increase despite an increase in surge pricing.
If Uber tweaked its algorithm so that the surge pricing was based less on instantaneous demand, and more on long term trends - so that for example at rush hour prices reliably rose every week - then you might see more drivers getting to the road at those times to take advantage of it.
As the article and the summary itself notes:
It moves current drivers from one side of town to the other. It does not put new drivers on the road.
His analysis shows that the surge pricing is not increasing the number of drivers working, it is only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another. This means that the unexpected side-effect noted in the article is that in some neighbourhoods the wait time actually increases along with the surge price increase.
I'm not against a market-oriented approach of surge-pricing to solve a supply need, but the way it is implemented by Uber the prices are changing too fast to serve as a meaningful incentive, so without an increase in drivers you're only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another and aggravating the problem in certain places.
And this why the Mars One mission would never work - putting together people who are committed to dying in a distant planet far from any of their loved ones would make for the worst type crewmates you'd want together in a mission.
And if you read about the 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal, you'll see that it failed because for it to be pulled off it required a half-dozen people to be involved in the conspiracy, which made it very likely that someone would be careless and talk. There were multiple security precautions, and overcoming them all involved multiple people and left a very easily traceable chain of evidence back to the perpetrator.
With the computer RNG, there was a single point of failure that could be overcome by a single well connected person, without any physical record except circumstantial evidence. I'd say the 1980 case, if anything proved how difficult it is to tamper with the spinning ball system without getting caught.
To add to this, people seem to forget everything that happened more than a month ago or so. I'd like to see the computer that would have ditched US flight Airways 1549 perfectly into the Hudson River just minutes after the start.
And the main reason flight 1549 landed perfectly in the Hudson river was due to the A320's fly-by-wire system, which allowed the pilot to maintain aircraft nose up and as low a speed as possible for landing without stalling. He had to maintain a fine line between gliding in slow enough to avoid injuries and not stalling, and without the onboard computer this would have been a difficult maneuver for a human pilot to accomplish with his workload.
I think if one is a depressed anything at all they should not be allowed to control the fate of hundreds of people. If a doctor finds any hint of depression then the airline and maybe FAA should be notified. Fuck doctor patient confidentiality when peoples' lives are directly at stake.
The likely reason the co-pilot hid his depression was due to the stigma that mental illness carries. If companies end up instituting a policy that people with signs of mental illness be immediately fired, it will end up stigmatizing them further. Instead of trying to seek treatment for their problems, pilots with depression will just hide their issues. Particularly if you get rid of doctor-patient confidentiality, as it would mean a pilot seeking treatment would be reported by the very person supposed to be helping them and might lose their jobs.
In Quebec they choose to actively suppress English and promote French ... the the extent you can't have English signage unless it's smaller than French, and they've ever tried to get companies like Best Buy and Home Depot to change to French names,
Most of us anglo-Quebecers are actually at ease with the fact that French is the dominant language and we need to adapt ourselves to it. I just consider a matter of common courtesy and politeness to make an effort to communicate with your neighbour. Sure, we will whine about the ridiculousness of the language police at times, but not many people argue with the principle of the language laws in trying to build a common society
Quebec are a bunch of whiny assholes, who increasingly are trying to pass laws which actively discriminate against anybody who isn't white, French, and Catholic -- to the extent that they want to ban religious symbols, unless of course it's a cross, and then it's OK.
We had a democratic debate on the matter, and showing that despite your characterization the overwhelming majority of Quebeckers, 75% of them, voted against the party that proposed to ban religious symbols. Showing that we're more tolerant than most of the US, we're legislators in Indiana made discrimination against minorities legal, or in Europe, where bans against religious headgear are part of the law in France. Quebec, on the other hand, has had an openly gay head of government, has a permissive attitude towards weed where it is openly smoked alongside cops in our parks (come to Montreal's park Mont Royal on a Sunday if you don't believe me), and brothels (aka massage parlors) openly advertise their storefronts downtown.
They think they're preserving their culture ... when their "culture" is bigotry, a ruined version of the language, and a sense of entitlement mixed in with being whiny cunts.
And then you finish your rant with a bigoted racist attack against la belle province. If you really want to find bigotry, look in the mirror.
How much do these cost compared to FEMA trailers? As maligned as the FEMA trailers are, I suspect the reason they are widely used in disasters is because they are cheap and can therefore be deployed in large quantities. Sure you could do something of higher quality, but if it raises their unit cost it will significantly affect the ability to widely deploy enough shelter in an affected area. Having a low cost solution that can be deployed in large numbers may be more important than quality in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
We sort of cover this in the US with points; you can't just drive recklessly and pay for it out of petty cash forever because you'll lose your license. But the day fine concept seems like a decent way to instill the same kind of aversion in everyone, fairly. Points are ephemeral but your money is obvious.
Except that rich people usually have drivers, and so whether you instill points or day fines they'll be mostly unaffected. At most, their driver may lose their license, in which case they'll just hire another one.
Rich people drive only as a form of entertainment and pleasure, and they can always take out their supercars to private racing tracks where a driving license is not a requirement.
The concept itself is deeply flawed. If you were a crewmember, would you entrust your safety to fellow crewmembers whose primary qualification is that they are willing to die (i.e. exhibit suicidal tendencies) ? There is a reason NASA carries out extensive psychological testing among its applicants. If you're going to entrust a multi-year multi-multi-billion dollar mission in the hands of a select group of people, you want those people to have strong survival insticts that will push them to do everything possible to overcome adversity to come out alive. You do not want people who are willing to give up on life.
Slander laws exist in almost every country, including the United States. And what the contractor said went beyond a simple rant - he implored other contractors not to work with the firm in question (thereby causing commercial harm to the company) and used racist language in his diatribe. If I went on a similar rant against an American company that resulted in a substantial loss of revenue for that company because of my allegations, I would very likely also be sued. The difference is that US courts have a higher standard to meet in a defamation suit, but given the loss of revenue and the racist diatribe even under US standards this contractor would be in hot water.
You're misconstruing the argument in the article. They're not saying that we should try to whitewash people who have done bad things, and a person's bad reputation may often be well deserved. They're warning against falling into the trap of, once someone happens into bad circumstances, of creating a narrative for that person that tries to assign their circumstances as a predestined result of fate. The most insidious example I see of this is when someone contracts a serious disease such as cancer. Often the first questions asked by medical staff are regarding their lifestyle choices, which builds into the narrative that they're sick because of the way they lived.
During the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, for example, the first questions asked to those diagnosed were often whether they lived a promiscuous lifestyle, took drugs, or engaged in gay sex. All activities which were frowned upon, and fed into the dominant societal narrative at the time that the people who were contracting AIDS were losers who contracted the disease because of their loser lifestyle. I'd argue in that case the loser edit was applied to a whole category of people, and held back progress in addressing a serious health issue.
If he can get a guarantee that the trial will be an public and open trial, and not done through a closed and secret military court, I think it can actually be a brilliant tactic. An open trial would force the government to air its eavesdropping activities out in the open. It could perhaps bring some judicial accountability by forcing them to defend the constitutionality of their activities.
However, that's all a big if, and I'm doubtful the government would agree to have Snowden tried in public court outside of a military court.
Isn't the process used laser metal sintering? There's no need to use trendy buzzwords ("3-d printing") that give the false impression that this is a new technique that a hobbyist could do in his basement, when really this is just a variation of a well established industrial process, that requires large industrial tooling.
So OpenStreetMaps is only now adding a basic mapping feature that's been available in other sites for over 10 years now, and somehow we're supposed to get excited about it? To me this is only highlighting how far behind a lot of the open source software is compared to commercially available applications.
You be real. One religion in recent history has been responsible for the vast vast majority of religious inspired violence
While this may be true for events of the last 15 years, this hasn't always been the case for even very recent history
During the 90s, most suicide bombings worldwide were being carried out by a primarily Hindu group (Tamil Tigers) and christian-on-christian religious violence in Northern Ireland would go on to kill more people than died in the 9/11 attacks
During the 70s, terrorism was mostly politically motivated, with far-right and far-left groups carrying out hundreds of bombings. Italy suffered through the Years of Lead, with several thousand people dying in bombings. In Germany, far-left groups like the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells carried out more than 300 bombings alone.
During the 50s, it was primarily nationalist and anti-colonial in nature. Guerrila groups resisting colonialism in Asia and Africa were the primary instigators then.
And go back to the 1920s, and you see radical Anarchists as the main culprits (e.g. see the 1919 Anarchist bombings in the US)
Saying that muslims are responsible for a majority of terrorism is a myopic view of contemporary history - the nature of terrorism has varied greatly with each generation. In another generation we'll likely be looking at another ideology or group to lay blame on.
Using satellite and radar images to identify archaeological sites from space isn't new. But while this method may help in identifying sites of interest, actually identifying Genghis Khan's tomb would require archaeologists to dig at each of those sites. And until an archaeologist is on the ground, the images may just be a peculiarly shaped hill mound.
So if the concerns is identify Genghi's tomb while respecting Mongolian reverence for burial sites, I don't see how this does that, as you'd still need archaeological digging to get useful science from the field.
they'll be using photo analysis algorithms to detect how intoxicated you were in the photo and suggest that you not post it
... Except that most of the time the people taking those photos are posting them while they are intoxicated, and therefore the suggestion not to post won't have any effect
My impression is the regret in taking these drunken pictures happens years after the fact, when the drunken college scene has been left behind, and the poster now has a family and a 9-to-5 job and they want to distance themselves from that past. Trying to tell college students that they shouldn't be posting inappropriate pictures of themselves drinking is futile, the warning will be completely ignored.
I'd say we had minority governments in Canada where third parties played a significant role, so their impact can't be neglected.
The other advantage of first-past-the-post system is that every voter within an electoral district has a clearly defined representative to represent and defend the interests of that constituency. A representative is elected to represent a particular district, and not just the voters who voted for him or her. In a proportional system, there is no guarantee of representation. If one votes for a third party that does not manage to elect any members, one is left without representation. And even if members of your party are elected, they may not elect members from your area. This lack of representation is the biggest flaw in the proportional representation system, in my opinion.
Start using a democratic system where every vote is equal, it's called Proportional Representation and works very well.
It would also be the end of the two party systems.
We have first past the post system here in Canada and we still manage to elect strong third parties. In fact we have 6 federal parties with elected members. In the last 20 years, we've also gone through 6 official opposition parties at the federal level. At the provincial level, the story is similar. Other countries with a first past the post system, such as the UK, also have strong third parties, so that's not the issue.
I'd also gerrymandering is a more of a symptom of a democratic deficit in US politics than a cause. The idea behind gerrymandering is to create "safe" electoral districts. Safe electoral districts are not usually stable here in Canada because it creates an easy opening for third party candidates. Voters in a strongly liberal district can vote for a liberal alternative without risk of a conservative candidate winning - likewise for a strongly conservative district. One should never have districts where one side wins with over 90% of the votes, as happens in numerous republican and democratic districts alike in the US, as that speaks to the lack of a democratic alternative at a local level in those districts.
While they may never find what happened to MH370, the search for it is leading to detailed mapping of an area of the ocean floor that was little explored. And now we're getting better mathematical models of the ocean currents. So while I know there's been a lot of criticism of continuing what seems like a fruitless search, the money isn't being wasted.
We may never find what happened to that aircraft, but we will have expanded our oceanographic knowledge of that area immensely.