Actually NO he does not have the choice on whether or not to enforce the law.
The president can certainly prioritize enforcing certain laws over others, and he can de-prioritize laws to the extent that they're basically not being enforced. The president isn't supposed to get involved in law enforcement on a case-by-case basis, but he can give directives to various agencies on what things they should pursue. Now, there are various ways in which the other branches of government can keep this power in check, limiting how much discretion he has, but he does have some discretion.
The power to create laws, such as would cover DACA, comes from congress.
Congress has the power to create laws, but the Executive branch has a a fair amount of latitude in deciding how to put them into effect and enforce them. If it were simply unconstitutional, someone who opposed it could have sued, and the courts would have decided that it was unconstitutional, and that would have been the end of it.
The reality is, it's a bit of a grey area. It probably would have survived in court, but it's probably better for Congress to make legally binding reforms.
But also, this isn't happening because someone decided, "Oh, well technically, legally, this should have been handled in Congress, so we'll let Congress handle it." If that were the case, Congress could have passed reforms at any time. This is happening now because a lot of Trump supporters are anti-immigrant, and he wants to keep their support.
From the summary, I had assumed that this was a standard case of a company accessing a person's email that was sent through that company's own mail server. I was pretty much ready to side with the employer. If you send an email through your company's mail server, you should expect that someone might view that email. Even if the employer isn't snooping, there are any number of reasons why someone at the company may need to review your work emails. However, the article states:
The company had presented Barbulescu with printouts of his private messages to his brother and fiancée on Yahoo Messenger as evidence of his breach of a company ban on such personal use.
So that makes it sound like this guy was using a personal Yahoo Messenger account. So that kind of takes me in the other direction, in favor of the employee's right to privacy. As a general rule, I don't think that your company should have the right to access your personal email/IM accounts, even if you happen to access them on work devices.
However, that doesn't really explain how they got access to his chats, unless they were stored on his work computer. I don't feel comfortable saying that a company shouldn't be allowed to review the contents of a company-owned computer. And this is further complicated by the fact that the employee stated, in writing, that the account was being used solely for work purposes. In that case, I could see an argument that the account is a work account, not a personal account, and so the employer should be allowed to access it.
In any case, I think there's some space between "what an employer should be legally allowed to do" and "what an employer should do". Even if employers can spy on employees and review private email, they should try to avoid reading anything that's not business related.
Honestly, it's kind of dumb that people put such a priority on coming up with completely original ideas and inventions. The history of art and science are full of borrowing ideas from somewhere else. Even great inventions are often just a tweak on an existing idea applied to a new scenario.
In something like this, the real issue isn't whether the idea is completely original, but whether the execution and implementation is good. When I'm using my phone, I just don't need the GUI to be completely unprecedented. It's fine with me if it's a completely unoriginal rip-off of previous UI conventions. I want it to be intuitive, easy to use, and not-at-all frustrating.
Yes, that would have made more sense. First, I wouldn't think humans made for efficient batteries, but our brains are good at processing information (in some ways, at least). Second, it would have made more sense of a lot of the phenomena in the Matrix. For example:
* Agents being able to run themselves on people makes more sense if people are processing units. Software doesn't really run on batteries.
* The importance of the Matrix for the machines. If people are just batteries and the Matrix is to keep them occupied, why do the machines care what happens within the Matrix? Why bother at all, when you could just lobotomize everyone or keep them unconscious? It makes more sense if the Matrix is sort of like the OS that the machines run on, and people are actually processing information as they go through the simulation.
* The abilities of "the One". Why would a battery have the ability to mess with the code of the Matrix? If it's a processor, then it makes more sense that he might process things differently then the other processors, and therefore be able to provide different output given the same input.
Sometimes, the intention isn't even to try to get the predictions correct. To use an obvious example, I doubt anyone working on "The Matrix" was anticipating that the human race would actually be imprisoned in a huge VR world so that AI could use their bodies as batteries. That wasn't the point.
I think this is the case with a lot of SciFi. The technology is there as a plot device, not as a prediction.
No they don't. Dell has a 7-day inventory turnover for parts, they're always on the forefront of components.
Having fast turnover for your inventory doesn't mean that you're constantly getting newer technology, nor does it mean that you're constantly getting the highest quality parts. It might mean that you're just being restocked with the same old crappy parts every 7 days. Or it might mean that they're using slightly different parts every 7 days and not testing the integration very well.
I'd also point out that it's not always much of a premium. A lot of times, when people complain that Macs are super-expensive, the complaint is something like, "That Macbook Pro is $1,300?! I can get a Dell laptop for $300. What a rip-off!" But then if you look at it, the Macbook is thinner, lighter, more powerful, has a better screen, and uses higher quality parts than the $300 Dell laptop. The model that's closest is probably the XPS model, and when you price out something with comparable features, you get something that's fairly comparable in price. Maybe it's still a little cheaper. Sometimes, you find the Dell is more expensive.
Admittedly, sometimes Macs are way too expensive for what you get. Most often, this happens when they haven't updated a model for a long time. Apple doesn't drop prices when a model hasn't been updated for a while, so if the latest iMac costs $1,200 and they don't update it for 2 years, then in two years it'll still cost $1,200 and it'll be 2-year-old technology. I'm not a huge fan of that, but that's just the way Apple runs things.
Cars will have to throw decisions it cant make back to the driver, the driver will need to be ready to accept this
And this is the problem with semi-autonomous vehicles. If you have the AI able to do everything *except* when there's an emergency, then when that emergency arises, the driver won't have been paying attention.
Humans can react to unknown situations, not always well but they can. Computers fail when they encounter situations outside their programming.
This is sort of true enough, but it raises a few questions:
1) What are the chances that car AIs will encounter situations outside their programming? If the probability can be dropped close enough to zero, it's a non-issue.
2) Are these "situations outside their programming" predictable and detectable? That is, will the AI be able to figure out when it's in a situation outside of its abilities?
3) If the answer to #2 is "yes", can we develop effective default responses for when the AI ends up in a situation outside of its abilities? For example, if the car finds itself in a situation where it can't continue to drive safely, can it then safely pull off to the side of the road, preventing a catastrophic outcome?
4) Can we contrive things so that the possible situations outside of their programming are fewer? For example, could we put some kind of a beacon on every car that transmits a signal to indicate its presence to nearby cars to diminish the possibility of the cars not seeing each other?
5) As you said, humans don't always react well to unknown or unexpected situations either. They also have a habit of not paying attention very well. Even if some problems with self-driving cars are never overcome, might they still be safer than human-driven cars?
I would bet that this is common for new technologies. I remember the early 1990s when a lot of people didn't like the idea of carrying a cell phone. I remember in the 2000s, few people saw the value of smartphones. I knew several people who weren't sure about Netflix streaming, and thought the idea of cord-cutting was absurd. A lot of those people have now cancelled their cable.
Of course people are unsure about self-driving cars. Give it enough time for them to be common, and to have a proven safety record. The results of that survey will change.
Well also, if you told someone that the suit was "tested to two atmospheres", I would expect some people might understand that to mean that the suit is able to maintain integrity when two atmospheres of pressure are on the outside of it. It makes sense to try to make a distinction and say that they tested it in a vacuum, but tested with greater pressure inside than would normally be necessary.
I don't know if there's a more commonly accepted way of making that distinction, but it makes sense to me that someone would want to make that distinction.
Philosophical debate on reality aside, there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency.
Sure there is. The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars. The fact that other people are legally required to accept it makes it "real money".
Now you can get all hypothetical and theoretical and say, "fiat money is always made up", but you said you wanted to put aside the philosophical debate on reality. Being very practical, there's not really anything to stop the value of bitcoin from dropping to zero tomorrow. There are a lot of things that will stop the value of the US dollar from dropping to zero tomorrow.
Not necessarily. A lot of stuff doesn't have to do with any real or perceived value. Prices can be driven by speculators speculating what other speculators will speculate.
That is, it's gamblers betting on what they think other gamblers will bet on, knowing that those other gamblers are also betting on what other gamblers will bet on. Even if they're pretty sure that Bitcoin is all hype and will eventually collapse, they're placing a bet that the bubble won't burst quite yet.
I don't know of a good cloud backup provider with a Linux client. However, you mention wanting to point it to a NAS, which opens another possibility: You could have the NAS backup directly to the cloud.
For example, if you get a Synology, it has a built in backup application that can backup to various cloud providers. I don't know any that will backup several TB for a fixed price, but you could backup to BackBlaze B2 (BackBlaze's service similar to Amazon S3) for as low as $0.005/GB. That's likely to be about as cheap as you'll find.
As someone else mentioned, BackBlaze's backup service is pretty good ($5 for unlimited storage), but it's only Mac/Windows, and I'm not aware of a way to get it to back up a NAS.
Yeah, Backblaze is a pretty good option for personal cloud workstation backups. However, it doesn't have a Linux client, which seems to be something the OP wants.
Why can't the phone companies use your email account as they're second factor for all attempts to re-point your phone number?
Well really, that's not even the problem here. Why didn't Verizon flag the fact that they'd called the customer and he'd repeatedly said he wasn't authorizing the changes, and locking the account in response? Why isn't Verizon honoring the passcode he added to his account?
This is a Verizon problem, not a technical problem.
There is an undercurrent of, if not "anti-science", then "science ambivalence". Amongst people I know who are numerate, and scientifically literate, their interest in science is accompanied by a love of different kinds of art. Many play musical instruments, for example. Their enthusiasm and hunger for culture is not dimmed by their love of science.
Yes, I think I know some of those people. I'd repeat again, "I've never known anyone intelligent who was entirely interested in all the associated topics covered by either one, nor completely disinterested in the topics covered by the other." That is to say, of the people I've known who are a bit "science ambivalent", most have had some kind of interest in a limited subset of science, technology, engineering, and/or math. Those who seem to have had no interest have been people who I would consider, even with some detachment, unintelligent.
Perhaps the natural curiosity the might have had has been extinguished by bad maths and science teaching.
I think this is definitely part of it. Essentially I'm kind of a math/technology guy with only a passing interest in engineering, not deeply interested in any particular scientific field, and I think the pro-science people sometimes go overboard. I was a philosophy major, which is "liberal arts", but also tied to STEM more than some pro-STEM people would like to acknowledge. I'm a bit ambivalent about music and poetry, I suspect partially due to bad teachers who gave me the expectation that I "wasn't good at that sort of thing", and should stick to math and science. I have a lot of friends, meanwhile, who are musicians and artists, and who have had some period of their lives when they avoided math and science, at least partially because some teachers early on let them know that they "weren't good at that sort of thing", and should stick to art and music. However, they're often fascinated by math/science concepts, and some of them have gotten into fields that in some way combine art and engineering (e.g. architecture).
Not only can I not think of anyone smart who completely dismisses STEM or Liberal Arts, but I can't imagine how someone intelligent with a healthy relationship to reality could possibly dismiss the value of either one.
Oh, that wasn't accidental, but there's a wonderful double-standard available to me that was originally in my post, but I edited out:
If you bash "liberal arts majors" for not being pro-science enough, then it seems to me you should have a scientific argument in your favor. If you'd like to argue that interesting thoughts and subjective experience aren't worthwhile when compared to cold, hard facts, then you'd better have cold hard facts.
If, on the other hand, you're on the side of subjective experience, you have the arguments of subjective experience open to you. And that's why the rigorous pro-science anti-everything-else people will eventually lose the argument. They've cut themselves off from some very powerful tools.
It seems like not only is that anecdotal, but it's also more opinion than fact, so from a STEM standpoint, it's not a very good answer. Also, you haven't even really provided a more subjective argument that might be considered worthwhile among the touchy-feely Liberal Arts people.
Personally, I think the grouping of Science, Technology Engineering, and Math all together as one topic is a bit of a stupid political thing. I think that grouping all of the Liberal Arts together is a bit of a weird artifact of classical education. And I've never known anyone intelligent who was entirely interested in all the associated topics covered by either one, nor completely disinterested in the topics covered by the other.
Oh look. Yet again "all violence is bad" is being interpreted as "you support nazis"
I'm continuing to give you the benefit of the doubt, so maybe this explanation will help:
If every time someone says, "Those violent Nazis are bad," and you say, "Well yeah, I'd agree that all violence is bad. But why are we singling out the Nazis?" then yes, you're defending Nazis. You're saying that the thing we should condemn is violence, and in turn implying that Nazis are completely acceptable so long as they don't turn violent. You're saying that a group of nonviolent Nazis are on equal moral standing with a group of nonviolent people who protest against murdering minorities.
Oh, sorry, my bad. "All violence is bad" is being interpreted as "you're a white supremacist".
You've just spent a bunch of time arguing with me in order to argue that we should be taking a "neutral" stance between Nazis and BLM, and making sure you avoid granting unequivocally that Nazis are bad. At the very least, that shows some kind of white supremacy sympathies. The fact that you've made sure your rhetoric complies with current white supremacist talking points, and that you get really angry when I insist Nazis are bad, makes me think you're a shill.
Trump: Violence is bad.
You: Why aren't you only telling us violence from the evil Nazis is bad.
Me: Violence is bad.
You: You're biased.
You're oversimplifying because you know you have no real argument. It's more like:
Trump: Violence is bad. What happened today is the fault of many sides.
Everyone else: Wait... "many sides"? There were Nazis protesting in favor of slavery and oppression, and one of them committed a terrorist act. What are the other "sides"? You're very outspoken about needing to call out Islamic terrorism, so why are you shying away from calling out white supremacist terrorism?
Trump: Well look, violence is always bad. The Nazis shouldn't have killed that woman because violence is bad.
Everyone else: Ok. That sounds pretty good... So why didn't you just say that in the first place?
Trump: Well I did. Violence is bad. Violent Nazis are bad. Violent people who don't like Nazis are bad. There are nice people in each group and bad people in each group. They're both equally to blame for the violence.
Everyone else: Um... ok, so you're not particularly opposed to Nazis or other white supremacists, then? You're just saying that violence is bad? And you're implying that the people who got run over are just as guilty for the violence as the people who did the running-over?
Trump: [silence]
I think it's becoming clear that you're a white supremacist shill pretending to be a "neutral" person from another country.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually NO he does not have the choice on whether or not to enforce the law.
The president can certainly prioritize enforcing certain laws over others, and he can de-prioritize laws to the extent that they're basically not being enforced. The president isn't supposed to get involved in law enforcement on a case-by-case basis, but he can give directives to various agencies on what things they should pursue. Now, there are various ways in which the other branches of government can keep this power in check, limiting how much discretion he has, but he does have some discretion.
The power to create laws, such as would cover DACA, comes from congress.
Congress has the power to create laws, but the Executive branch has a a fair amount of latitude in deciding how to put them into effect and enforce them. If it were simply unconstitutional, someone who opposed it could have sued, and the courts would have decided that it was unconstitutional, and that would have been the end of it.
The reality is, it's a bit of a grey area. It probably would have survived in court, but it's probably better for Congress to make legally binding reforms.
But also, this isn't happening because someone decided, "Oh, well technically, legally, this should have been handled in Congress, so we'll let Congress handle it." If that were the case, Congress could have passed reforms at any time. This is happening now because a lot of Trump supporters are anti-immigrant, and he wants to keep their support.
From the summary, I had assumed that this was a standard case of a company accessing a person's email that was sent through that company's own mail server. I was pretty much ready to side with the employer. If you send an email through your company's mail server, you should expect that someone might view that email. Even if the employer isn't snooping, there are any number of reasons why someone at the company may need to review your work emails. However, the article states:
The company had presented Barbulescu with printouts of his private messages to his brother and fiancée on Yahoo Messenger as evidence of his breach of a company ban on such personal use.
So that makes it sound like this guy was using a personal Yahoo Messenger account. So that kind of takes me in the other direction, in favor of the employee's right to privacy. As a general rule, I don't think that your company should have the right to access your personal email/IM accounts, even if you happen to access them on work devices.
However, that doesn't really explain how they got access to his chats, unless they were stored on his work computer. I don't feel comfortable saying that a company shouldn't be allowed to review the contents of a company-owned computer. And this is further complicated by the fact that the employee stated, in writing, that the account was being used solely for work purposes. In that case, I could see an argument that the account is a work account, not a personal account, and so the employer should be allowed to access it.
In any case, I think there's some space between "what an employer should be legally allowed to do" and "what an employer should do". Even if employers can spy on employees and review private email, they should try to avoid reading anything that's not business related.
Honestly, it's kind of dumb that people put such a priority on coming up with completely original ideas and inventions. The history of art and science are full of borrowing ideas from somewhere else. Even great inventions are often just a tweak on an existing idea applied to a new scenario.
In something like this, the real issue isn't whether the idea is completely original, but whether the execution and implementation is good. When I'm using my phone, I just don't need the GUI to be completely unprecedented. It's fine with me if it's a completely unoriginal rip-off of previous UI conventions. I want it to be intuitive, easy to use, and not-at-all frustrating.
There's no explanation for what amounted for this growth.
Is that supposed to be "what accounted for this growth"? Maybe my brain is broken. Is my brain broken?
Yes, that would have made more sense. First, I wouldn't think humans made for efficient batteries, but our brains are good at processing information (in some ways, at least). Second, it would have made more sense of a lot of the phenomena in the Matrix. For example:
* Agents being able to run themselves on people makes more sense if people are processing units. Software doesn't really run on batteries.
* The importance of the Matrix for the machines. If people are just batteries and the Matrix is to keep them occupied, why do the machines care what happens within the Matrix? Why bother at all, when you could just lobotomize everyone or keep them unconscious? It makes more sense if the Matrix is sort of like the OS that the machines run on, and people are actually processing information as they go through the simulation.
* The abilities of "the One". Why would a battery have the ability to mess with the code of the Matrix? If it's a processor, then it makes more sense that he might process things differently then the other processors, and therefore be able to provide different output given the same input.
No, not Apple hardware only. I've formatted a Sandisk thumb drive and an WD USB drive with APFS.
It's just a new file system. You should be able to use it in place of HFS+, anywhere where you could use HFS+.
Sometimes, the intention isn't even to try to get the predictions correct. To use an obvious example, I doubt anyone working on "The Matrix" was anticipating that the human race would actually be imprisoned in a huge VR world so that AI could use their bodies as batteries. That wasn't the point.
I think this is the case with a lot of SciFi. The technology is there as a plot device, not as a prediction.
No they don't. Dell has a 7-day inventory turnover for parts, they're always on the forefront of components.
Having fast turnover for your inventory doesn't mean that you're constantly getting newer technology, nor does it mean that you're constantly getting the highest quality parts. It might mean that you're just being restocked with the same old crappy parts every 7 days. Or it might mean that they're using slightly different parts every 7 days and not testing the integration very well.
I'd also point out that it's not always much of a premium. A lot of times, when people complain that Macs are super-expensive, the complaint is something like, "That Macbook Pro is $1,300?! I can get a Dell laptop for $300. What a rip-off!" But then if you look at it, the Macbook is thinner, lighter, more powerful, has a better screen, and uses higher quality parts than the $300 Dell laptop. The model that's closest is probably the XPS model, and when you price out something with comparable features, you get something that's fairly comparable in price. Maybe it's still a little cheaper. Sometimes, you find the Dell is more expensive.
Admittedly, sometimes Macs are way too expensive for what you get. Most often, this happens when they haven't updated a model for a long time. Apple doesn't drop prices when a model hasn't been updated for a while, so if the latest iMac costs $1,200 and they don't update it for 2 years, then in two years it'll still cost $1,200 and it'll be 2-year-old technology. I'm not a huge fan of that, but that's just the way Apple runs things.
People keep calling him a "wunderkind". He doesn't even know what that means.
Cars will have to throw decisions it cant make back to the driver, the driver will need to be ready to accept this
And this is the problem with semi-autonomous vehicles. If you have the AI able to do everything *except* when there's an emergency, then when that emergency arises, the driver won't have been paying attention.
Humans can react to unknown situations, not always well but they can. Computers fail when they encounter situations outside their programming.
This is sort of true enough, but it raises a few questions:
1) What are the chances that car AIs will encounter situations outside their programming? If the probability can be dropped close enough to zero, it's a non-issue.
2) Are these "situations outside their programming" predictable and detectable? That is, will the AI be able to figure out when it's in a situation outside of its abilities?
3) If the answer to #2 is "yes", can we develop effective default responses for when the AI ends up in a situation outside of its abilities? For example, if the car finds itself in a situation where it can't continue to drive safely, can it then safely pull off to the side of the road, preventing a catastrophic outcome?
4) Can we contrive things so that the possible situations outside of their programming are fewer? For example, could we put some kind of a beacon on every car that transmits a signal to indicate its presence to nearby cars to diminish the possibility of the cars not seeing each other?
5) As you said, humans don't always react well to unknown or unexpected situations either. They also have a habit of not paying attention very well. Even if some problems with self-driving cars are never overcome, might they still be safer than human-driven cars?
I would bet that this is common for new technologies. I remember the early 1990s when a lot of people didn't like the idea of carrying a cell phone. I remember in the 2000s, few people saw the value of smartphones. I knew several people who weren't sure about Netflix streaming, and thought the idea of cord-cutting was absurd. A lot of those people have now cancelled their cable.
Of course people are unsure about self-driving cars. Give it enough time for them to be common, and to have a proven safety record. The results of that survey will change.
Well also, if you told someone that the suit was "tested to two atmospheres", I would expect some people might understand that to mean that the suit is able to maintain integrity when two atmospheres of pressure are on the outside of it. It makes sense to try to make a distinction and say that they tested it in a vacuum, but tested with greater pressure inside than would normally be necessary.
I don't know if there's a more commonly accepted way of making that distinction, but it makes sense to me that someone would want to make that distinction.
Philosophical debate on reality aside, there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency.
Sure there is. The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars. The fact that other people are legally required to accept it makes it "real money".
Now you can get all hypothetical and theoretical and say, "fiat money is always made up", but you said you wanted to put aside the philosophical debate on reality. Being very practical, there's not really anything to stop the value of bitcoin from dropping to zero tomorrow. There are a lot of things that will stop the value of the US dollar from dropping to zero tomorrow.
Not necessarily. A lot of stuff doesn't have to do with any real or perceived value. Prices can be driven by speculators speculating what other speculators will speculate.
That is, it's gamblers betting on what they think other gamblers will bet on, knowing that those other gamblers are also betting on what other gamblers will bet on. Even if they're pretty sure that Bitcoin is all hype and will eventually collapse, they're placing a bet that the bubble won't burst quite yet.
They said (emphasis mine):
Microsoft will not download install files for new operating systems to a user system’s hard disk without a user's consent.
How about you just don't upload or download anything without the user's consent?
I don't know of a good cloud backup provider with a Linux client. However, you mention wanting to point it to a NAS, which opens another possibility: You could have the NAS backup directly to the cloud.
For example, if you get a Synology, it has a built in backup application that can backup to various cloud providers. I don't know any that will backup several TB for a fixed price, but you could backup to BackBlaze B2 (BackBlaze's service similar to Amazon S3) for as low as $0.005/GB. That's likely to be about as cheap as you'll find.
As someone else mentioned, BackBlaze's backup service is pretty good ($5 for unlimited storage), but it's only Mac/Windows, and I'm not aware of a way to get it to back up a NAS.
Yeah, Backblaze is a pretty good option for personal cloud workstation backups. However, it doesn't have a Linux client, which seems to be something the OP wants.
Why can't the phone companies use your email account as they're second factor for all attempts to re-point your phone number?
Well really, that's not even the problem here. Why didn't Verizon flag the fact that they'd called the customer and he'd repeatedly said he wasn't authorizing the changes, and locking the account in response? Why isn't Verizon honoring the passcode he added to his account?
This is a Verizon problem, not a technical problem.
There is an undercurrent of, if not "anti-science", then "science ambivalence". Amongst people I know who are numerate, and scientifically literate, their interest in science is accompanied by a love of different kinds of art. Many play musical instruments, for example. Their enthusiasm and hunger for culture is not dimmed by their love of science.
Yes, I think I know some of those people. I'd repeat again, "I've never known anyone intelligent who was entirely interested in all the associated topics covered by either one, nor completely disinterested in the topics covered by the other." That is to say, of the people I've known who are a bit "science ambivalent", most have had some kind of interest in a limited subset of science, technology, engineering, and/or math. Those who seem to have had no interest have been people who I would consider, even with some detachment, unintelligent.
Perhaps the natural curiosity the might have had has been extinguished by bad maths and science teaching.
I think this is definitely part of it. Essentially I'm kind of a math/technology guy with only a passing interest in engineering, not deeply interested in any particular scientific field, and I think the pro-science people sometimes go overboard. I was a philosophy major, which is "liberal arts", but also tied to STEM more than some pro-STEM people would like to acknowledge. I'm a bit ambivalent about music and poetry, I suspect partially due to bad teachers who gave me the expectation that I "wasn't good at that sort of thing", and should stick to math and science. I have a lot of friends, meanwhile, who are musicians and artists, and who have had some period of their lives when they avoided math and science, at least partially because some teachers early on let them know that they "weren't good at that sort of thing", and should stick to art and music. However, they're often fascinated by math/science concepts, and some of them have gotten into fields that in some way combine art and engineering (e.g. architecture).
Not only can I not think of anyone smart who completely dismisses STEM or Liberal Arts, but I can't imagine how someone intelligent with a healthy relationship to reality could possibly dismiss the value of either one.
Oh, that wasn't accidental, but there's a wonderful double-standard available to me that was originally in my post, but I edited out:
If you bash "liberal arts majors" for not being pro-science enough, then it seems to me you should have a scientific argument in your favor. If you'd like to argue that interesting thoughts and subjective experience aren't worthwhile when compared to cold, hard facts, then you'd better have cold hard facts.
If, on the other hand, you're on the side of subjective experience, you have the arguments of subjective experience open to you. And that's why the rigorous pro-science anti-everything-else people will eventually lose the argument. They've cut themselves off from some very powerful tools.
It seems like not only is that anecdotal, but it's also more opinion than fact, so from a STEM standpoint, it's not a very good answer. Also, you haven't even really provided a more subjective argument that might be considered worthwhile among the touchy-feely Liberal Arts people.
Personally, I think the grouping of Science, Technology Engineering, and Math all together as one topic is a bit of a stupid political thing. I think that grouping all of the Liberal Arts together is a bit of a weird artifact of classical education. And I've never known anyone intelligent who was entirely interested in all the associated topics covered by either one, nor completely disinterested in the topics covered by the other.
Oh look. Yet again "all violence is bad" is being interpreted as "you support nazis"
I'm continuing to give you the benefit of the doubt, so maybe this explanation will help:
If every time someone says, "Those violent Nazis are bad," and you say, "Well yeah, I'd agree that all violence is bad. But why are we singling out the Nazis?" then yes, you're defending Nazis. You're saying that the thing we should condemn is violence, and in turn implying that Nazis are completely acceptable so long as they don't turn violent. You're saying that a group of nonviolent Nazis are on equal moral standing with a group of nonviolent people who protest against murdering minorities.
Oh, sorry, my bad. "All violence is bad" is being interpreted as "you're a white supremacist".
You've just spent a bunch of time arguing with me in order to argue that we should be taking a "neutral" stance between Nazis and BLM, and making sure you avoid granting unequivocally that Nazis are bad. At the very least, that shows some kind of white supremacy sympathies. The fact that you've made sure your rhetoric complies with current white supremacist talking points, and that you get really angry when I insist Nazis are bad, makes me think you're a shill.
Am I wrong?
Trump: Violence is bad. You: Why aren't you only telling us violence from the evil Nazis is bad. Me: Violence is bad. You: You're biased.
You're oversimplifying because you know you have no real argument. It's more like:
Trump: Violence is bad. What happened today is the fault of many sides.
Everyone else: Wait... "many sides"? There were Nazis protesting in favor of slavery and oppression, and one of them committed a terrorist act. What are the other "sides"? You're very outspoken about needing to call out Islamic terrorism, so why are you shying away from calling out white supremacist terrorism?
Trump: Well look, violence is always bad. The Nazis shouldn't have killed that woman because violence is bad.
Everyone else: Ok. That sounds pretty good... So why didn't you just say that in the first place?
Trump: Well I did. Violence is bad. Violent Nazis are bad. Violent people who don't like Nazis are bad. There are nice people in each group and bad people in each group. They're both equally to blame for the violence.
Everyone else: Um... ok, so you're not particularly opposed to Nazis or other white supremacists, then? You're just saying that violence is bad? And you're implying that the people who got run over are just as guilty for the violence as the people who did the running-over?
Trump: [silence]
I think it's becoming clear that you're a white supremacist shill pretending to be a "neutral" person from another country.