I don't think you're quite right about that. Working in the US, I've worked for a few small businesses (less than 100 employees) where there was an official CEO or single "boss", but there didn't need to be. Major decisions were really made as a collaborative effort among the senior staff, and smaller decisions were delegated to individual senior staff members. Now, there did need to be some method of settling disagreements. Depending on the nature of the disagreements in these companies, it may be that the disagreement was settled by "the boss" (owner/CEO), but those instances were rare in the companies I'm thinking of. Usually the head IT guy made IT decisions, the head finance guy made finance decisions. The head of sales made sales decisions, and so on. The CEO was often, in reality, just one of those heads, except in the rare situations where he wanted to pull rank.
So I think that this could work in the US, at least in companies that are run well and have a good senior staff. I think the key thing here isn't the geographic location or even the culture, but the size of the company. The staff consists of 40 people, well below Dunbar's number, which enables a more organic, communal, and collaborative decision-making process. If they continued to grow, they would eventually need to to adjust and formalize their decision-making. However, I don't really see a reason why a company, even a large one, *needs* a single CEO. It seems like you could still have a board of senior staff who votes on issues, the big downside being that it may be time-consuming to have to convene a formal meeting when decisions need to be made, rather than delegating to a single person.
Maybe that's an indication that we should be spending out time figuring out how to make cell networks more resilient and robust, rather than making regulations forcing cell manufacturers to shoehorn in old technology that most people don't want.
It's not a bad idea, but it seems like it could still have some problems because:
* Banks are only sort of technically savvy. For all of their capability "when they want to be", they're also stodgy old traditional institutions that don't like change and don't want to deal with technology. Unless it's high-frequency trading, or something like that.
* Much like tech companies, banks and credit card companies also don't like to work with each other to develop new standards. For as outdated and insecure as credit cards are, they still seemed to be avoiding the credit cards with chips. If banks would work together on new technical standards, we wouldn't be waiting for Apple/Google to develop their own competing payment services.
they can freeze all "cash-equivalent" assets for weeks and when unfrozen, everything above the FDIC** insurance limit takes a haircut (40% in the case of Cyprus)... in order to avoid major FDIC insurance impact of liquidation, the FDIC has shopped the bank assets to other banks
Admittedly, I'm not a major financial expert, but if you're talking about FDIC, you're basically talking about the government seizing control of the bank, still bailing them out, figuring out what to do with the assets, which may be selling them to other banks. In the case of the 2008 crisis, it would have basically meant taking control of all the banks and the government would then have a nationalized banking system. Even if you don't have a problem with the nationalized banking system, that's a lot for the government to take on all at once. And basically all the banks were screwed, so there weren't really a bunch of other banks to sell the assets to.
Am I wrong? I don't know all about Cyprus, but it seems like freezing all assets for all the banks for a few weeks might also cause some chaos all by itself.
If your employer doesn't have a contingency for this, they are stupid.
If people didn't do stupid things, then the banking crisis wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Honestly, I wish there were good news curation. It might be a way to get people to pay for news again, but at the very least, it'd be my preferred way of staying up to date. Basically have someone really read a lot of news everyday from all kinds of different sources, and then put together a sort of meta-newpaper of the most important stories of the day.
Right now, I have a few different news aggregators that just seem to haphazardly pull whatever stories from whatever sources in an automated and somewhat random way. I'd really appreciate someone taking the time to select stories in a coherent way that says, "These are the stories you really should read today in order to get a full picture of what's going on." Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is doing a very good job at that.
This is why I maintain that we need identity/security providers that will manage the keys and encryption schemes for you. The real problems are:
* Slashdot nerds (and the like) get all freaked out about the idea of a 3rd party managing people's keys. In order to be truly secure, it's necessary that only you can ever possibly get access to your keys, which means that you need to manage them yourselves. Therefore, any scheme that requires trusting a 3rd party gets rejected.
* Each vendor/developer wants to create their own standard, and then have everyone use their solution. No one works on real standards anymore. Facebook wants you to use Facebook Messenger. Apple wants you to use iMessage. Google wants you to use Hangouts. Or whatever. The point is, major companies are not working to come up with a cohesive modern secure messaging standard.
Now in answer to the first problem, I think to some degree, these people just need to get over it. Most people are sending unencrypted emails, so if they had their email encryption managed by Microsoft or Google, it would still be substantially more secure than it is now. The idea that some people might entrust their keys to a 3rd party should not be a bad thing, since most people are not qualified to manage their own encryption scheme.
What the nerds should want is only to be able to set up their own encryption key management if they feel it's necessary. Similar to the way many people use cloud email services, but you *can* set up your own email server, there should be simple cloud encryption/identity services, but people should still be allowed to set up their own encryption/identity servers.
The second problem is much more difficult. How do you get ubiquitous adoption of security standards where companies have an interest in maintaining incompatibility? I really don't know. One of the historically successful methods of creating an adoption of standards is through some kind of governmental action (either direct regulation, or requirements for government contracts). However, nobody trusts the government to push an encryption scheme, since they only want communication security when they can preserve a backdoor.
It's a shame. We really could do so much better if people weren't such idiots. And the problem isn't that "the common man" is an idiot, but that the people running various companies, and the people running the government, are all a bunch of idiots.
Hopefully this time they don't bail out the banks and and the idiots who bought mcmansions.
And how do you imagine that would work out? If everyone's bank accounts suddenly evaporate, your savings will be gone. And your employer's bank accounts will disappear. And your employer's customers' bank accounts will disappear. And then you have riots in the streets.
I suppose the houses that escape the fires will be cheaper, assuming anyone has money to buy them. You won't be able to get a loan because the banks will be gone, and you'll have no savings, so it's not clear where that money will come from.. And it's not clear what currency anyone will be accepting.
Also, it just doesn't make sense to have "free market" infrastructure. Free markets imply a low barrier to entry, allowing new upstarts to compete. Now think about roads, for example. How many different roads systems does it make sense to have? And no, I'm not asking how many different roads we should have, but different road systems. To make it more clearly, how many different roads should you expect to connect directly to your driveway? The answer is "one", at least under most circumstances.
You can say the same thing about water, electricity, or whatever else. I guess you could say it makes sense to have multiple sources of power generation, but it only makes sense to have one set of electrical cables connecting your apartment to the grid. It only makes sense to have one set of pipes connecting your apartment to a water source.
And Internet is infrastructure. You're never going to have real competition, so a free market can't be the solution.
Yes, if it is Government business. If is GOP/politcal party business, then no.
I bet they're all very discerning about making sure not to conduct the shadier aspects of their government business over the untraceable lines of communication.
I just mentioned this because, at my parents house, the only option was Verizon 3G up until just a couple years ago. These days T-Mobile and Verizon both have LTE, but I don't know if this is that case in more rural areas in general.
The only places they lag behind are on more remote roads (though even there they have improved), and also on things like repeaters in hotel conference areas (I think Version/AT&T have a lot more of those set up).
Also, I didn't read the whole report, but they seem to be saying that T-Mobile is on par with Verizon for LTE coverage. From that information alone, it's possible that Verizon still has better 3G and 2G coverage in rural areas that don't get 4G coverage from anyone.
Availability of high-speed data services shows that all four carriers have improved, but T-Mobile (86.6%) is now within two percentage points of Verizon (88.2%) when it comes to finding an LTE signal.
Now that doesn't mean that T-Mobile coverage is as good as Verizon's where you live, but it does indicate that according to this study, T-Mobile's LTE coverage is on par with Verizon's nation wide.
That's nonsense. First, as you said, email is a bit of a gray area because case history is not as established as Fax, but that doesn't mean email is insufficient. They'd been accepting emails already, indicating that email was sufficient for this purpose. We're not talking about signed contracts, just a request for information that people have a legal right to access. If there were some particular security issue, they could add some kind of requirement for email requests (e.g. must be submitted in a webform after verifying your email address, or must contain a valid digital signature).
Unless someone can point to some reason why a simple email is insufficient, this seems suspicious. Considering the context of a new administration that seems intent on violating the Constitution, it's very suspicious indeed.
Unless the company relies on the public good will (which most do to some degree), in which case public image matters, in which case the company might want to at least appear to be concerned with some of those global issues.
Well owners would be concerned with sustainable growth, and therefore they would agree that you have to focus on making the company work by having good employees and attracting customers.
One of the fundamental issues with our economic system relying on publicly traded corporations is that shareholders are not real owners. A lot of shareholders are people who only want *this quarter* to be successful so that the stock will go up, so that they can sell their shares. That's it. They're not necessarily interested in what the company does or how well it does it, but just whether they can sell their shares at a profit tomorrow.
Also, the even the current goal of most apps is not to develop something useful and lasting. It's to make the new Flappy Bird. Or to make a new social networking app that doesn't offer real benefits over the old one, but it's catchy enough that maybe some teenagers will use it. The eventual goal of these app developers is often not even to create a sustainable company, but just to get purchased by Google.
I wonder if I have this or something like it. I'm definitely sensitive to the sounds of people eating. The personal hell would probably include someone eating really crispy potato chips with their mouth open, licking and smacking their lips. It makes me unjustifiably angry and frustrated. I know my emotional reaction to it isn't proportional to the offense, but it makes me temporarily hate the person who's eating.
I have another weird thing, and I wonder if that might be connected. I wouldn't normally connect it, but if they're saying it's due to a weird response in the brain to sound, maybe it is? Basically, really loud music makes me sleepy. Like, I've gone to punk shows where the music is extremely loud and somewhat grating, and I feel an immediate need to go to sleep. If there's a comfortable place to sit, I might just drift off. As soon as I get out into an environment that's quieter, my energy returns. I'm not sure I noticed it until someone else pointed it out. I've thought that maybe it's like my brain gets overloaded and says, "Nope, this is too much. I'm shutting down."
So now I'm just wondering, maybe I have a generalized thing where my brain is responding strangely to auditory stimuli.
Eh... I'm not sure I buy that. Say what you want, but it's really easy to rationalize some reason to be upset. It's especially stupid to say, "I hate hypocrisy!" because there's so much hypocrisy in the world, and there's no reason why you would pick this example of hypocrisy to get butthurt about.
So what's really upsetting you? Is it the idea that the "leftist nutjobs" are getting away with terrible things? Or is it that other people don't find it acceptable for you to be racist? The more you rationalize, the more it seems like it's the latter.
Sure, "White Supremacists" can be blocked from Reddit, but what about the leftist nutjobs who believe that you should destroy other people's property and physically assault people with a different political viewpoint? I don't look at reddit as a rule, but I'd be willing to bet that extremist left wing groups exist on reddit and will not receive the same treatment as the "alt-right".
Honest question: Which thing is upsetting to you, that "leftish nutjobs" aren't being banned, or that "White Supremacists" are being banned?
Because sometimes I can't really tell, but it seems an awful lot like people are really complaining that they're not being allowed to harass and attack minorities. Like some guy uses the "n-word" and people say that it's not ok, and his response is, "I hear black people say 'honkey' and 'cracker', and nobody yells at them!"
And my thinking is, ok, fine, we can talk about whether it should be ok to use those words, but you're not really complaining about that. You're just using that as an example of perceived unfairness. It really seems to be more about you really wanting to use offensive language to harass minorities, and you don't like being told that it's inappropriate to do so.
I can't think of a public online community that doesn't get abusive at times, but I think websites do need to draw a line somewhere. Like, on one side of the line you have friendliness and puppies, and on the other side you have doxxing and real-life death threats. You've got to draw the line somewhere in between, and I don't know exactly where you want to do that.
I'm not really trying to take sides here, just trying to be fair. In my opinion, if there's a community on reddit that's doxxing people and the moderators aren't even trying to stop it, then that whole subreddit should be banned, regardless of their political affiliations. I'm not aware of what communities you're talking about, or what events in them you're referring to.
Well, apart from Reddit's blindness to comparable content and behaviour from people representing other parts of the political spectrum.
I'm not going to try to judge whether that's a valid criticism since I don't know what you're referring to, but I would point out that Reddit is a private company with no obligation to be unbiased. They might have some reasons to try to be unbiased, but it's not a "freedom of speech" issue either way.
Not that you said it was, but that seems to be where these discussions inevitably go.
I think I've seen like 2 of these things, both of them worn by people who work in IT.
I know it's become a bit of a cliche, but I'm reminded of the quote, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I think it's because I had an iPod in 2003, and I remember people thought I was insane. Nobody was buying iPods of Macs. Apple was still a dying company, and OSX was a weak last-ditch effort to stay relevant.
And then I visited NYC... iPods and Macs were all over the place. I went back home, and people still thought the iPod was stupid. Nobody else had them. It was a flop.
A few years later, I bought my brother an iPod as a gift. He didn't know what it was. He lived in a relatively rural area, and had never seen one. Nobody was spending money on iPods. Why wouldn't you just buy CDs like a normal person.
A few years later, my brother called me to ask what I thought about the iPhone. He'd never had a smart phone, and he thought they were stupid, but he knew I had an iPhone, so he wanted to ask. I asked, "Are you thinking of getting one?" He said, "Well, yeah. I know I just said I thought they were stupid, but I'm on my third iPod and I love the thing."
He hasn't been without an iPhone since. The idea of going back to a non-smart-phone seems like nonsense to him, as it does to most of the rest of us.
Now, I'm not saying that the Apple Watch will ever be as successful as the iPod or iPhone, or even the iPad. I'm just saying, a lot can change in a few years. Having lived in NYC for several years now, I've definitely noticed that trends-- even technological trends-- occur in New York before most of the country. I watched iPods and Mac and iPhones gain popularity here while the rest of the country still thought they were weird and obscure. I've gone to the South and the Midwest and seen teenagers wearing "the latest styles", which were what the kids in NYC wore 3 years ago. And right now, I'm seeing a fair number of people wearing smart watches. Some Android watches, but mostly Apple watches.
Well part of the thing is that I do like the service this business provides. I like the owner and I like the people who work there. I have no desire to complain, and I don't want to cause them to think that I'm generally unhappy with the service I've received.
It's just, if I'm being honest, they could improve a little.
I think it's also important to consider that satisfaction surveys tend to suffer from a sort of selection bias. You're only getting feedback from people who feel compelled to give feedback. In my personal experience you'll get:
- Sometimes people who are angry
- Occasional people who are extremely pleased
- Often people who have excessive esteem of their own opinions**
- Rarely people who just want to give helpful feedback
I'm not pointing this out to necessarily disparage these groups or say that their opinions aren't valid, but it's important to understand you're unlikely to get a true random sampling.
**I know someone is going to take issue with my third item, "people who have excessive esteem of their own opinions", so I'll try to explain what I mean by that. Obviously people's opinions are important, or you wouldn't be asking for feedback. And yes, everyone values their opinions more than others'. However, there are some people who... you read their online review, and you can tell that they believe their review will impress everyone and settle all disputes. Like you'll read a negative Yelp review, and the reviewer isn't just saying, "I had an bad experience," or "I didn't like it," but something more like, "This place is simply objectively terrible and though I see other people saying that they like the place, they're all wrong and stupid and not worth listening to." You can almost imagine that they've finished writing the review, leaned back in their chair, and thought, "Well that waiter crossed the wrong person. I expect they'll go out of business any day now."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're quite right about that. Working in the US, I've worked for a few small businesses (less than 100 employees) where there was an official CEO or single "boss", but there didn't need to be. Major decisions were really made as a collaborative effort among the senior staff, and smaller decisions were delegated to individual senior staff members. Now, there did need to be some method of settling disagreements. Depending on the nature of the disagreements in these companies, it may be that the disagreement was settled by "the boss" (owner/CEO), but those instances were rare in the companies I'm thinking of. Usually the head IT guy made IT decisions, the head finance guy made finance decisions. The head of sales made sales decisions, and so on. The CEO was often, in reality, just one of those heads, except in the rare situations where he wanted to pull rank.
So I think that this could work in the US, at least in companies that are run well and have a good senior staff. I think the key thing here isn't the geographic location or even the culture, but the size of the company. The staff consists of 40 people, well below Dunbar's number, which enables a more organic, communal, and collaborative decision-making process. If they continued to grow, they would eventually need to to adjust and formalize their decision-making. However, I don't really see a reason why a company, even a large one, *needs* a single CEO. It seems like you could still have a board of senior staff who votes on issues, the big downside being that it may be time-consuming to have to convene a formal meeting when decisions need to be made, rather than delegating to a single person.
Maybe that's an indication that we should be spending out time figuring out how to make cell networks more resilient and robust, rather than making regulations forcing cell manufacturers to shoehorn in old technology that most people don't want.
It's not a bad idea, but it seems like it could still have some problems because:
* Banks are only sort of technically savvy. For all of their capability "when they want to be", they're also stodgy old traditional institutions that don't like change and don't want to deal with technology. Unless it's high-frequency trading, or something like that.
* Much like tech companies, banks and credit card companies also don't like to work with each other to develop new standards. For as outdated and insecure as credit cards are, they still seemed to be avoiding the credit cards with chips. If banks would work together on new technical standards, we wouldn't be waiting for Apple/Google to develop their own competing payment services.
they can freeze all "cash-equivalent" assets for weeks and when unfrozen, everything above the FDIC** insurance limit takes a haircut (40% in the case of Cyprus)... in order to avoid major FDIC insurance impact of liquidation, the FDIC has shopped the bank assets to other banks
Admittedly, I'm not a major financial expert, but if you're talking about FDIC, you're basically talking about the government seizing control of the bank, still bailing them out, figuring out what to do with the assets, which may be selling them to other banks. In the case of the 2008 crisis, it would have basically meant taking control of all the banks and the government would then have a nationalized banking system. Even if you don't have a problem with the nationalized banking system, that's a lot for the government to take on all at once. And basically all the banks were screwed, so there weren't really a bunch of other banks to sell the assets to.
Am I wrong? I don't know all about Cyprus, but it seems like freezing all assets for all the banks for a few weeks might also cause some chaos all by itself.
If your employer doesn't have a contingency for this, they are stupid.
If people didn't do stupid things, then the banking crisis wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Honestly, I wish there were good news curation. It might be a way to get people to pay for news again, but at the very least, it'd be my preferred way of staying up to date. Basically have someone really read a lot of news everyday from all kinds of different sources, and then put together a sort of meta-newpaper of the most important stories of the day.
Right now, I have a few different news aggregators that just seem to haphazardly pull whatever stories from whatever sources in an automated and somewhat random way. I'd really appreciate someone taking the time to select stories in a coherent way that says, "These are the stories you really should read today in order to get a full picture of what's going on." Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is doing a very good job at that.
This is why I maintain that we need identity/security providers that will manage the keys and encryption schemes for you. The real problems are:
* Slashdot nerds (and the like) get all freaked out about the idea of a 3rd party managing people's keys. In order to be truly secure, it's necessary that only you can ever possibly get access to your keys, which means that you need to manage them yourselves. Therefore, any scheme that requires trusting a 3rd party gets rejected.
* Each vendor/developer wants to create their own standard, and then have everyone use their solution. No one works on real standards anymore. Facebook wants you to use Facebook Messenger. Apple wants you to use iMessage. Google wants you to use Hangouts. Or whatever. The point is, major companies are not working to come up with a cohesive modern secure messaging standard.
Now in answer to the first problem, I think to some degree, these people just need to get over it. Most people are sending unencrypted emails, so if they had their email encryption managed by Microsoft or Google, it would still be substantially more secure than it is now. The idea that some people might entrust their keys to a 3rd party should not be a bad thing, since most people are not qualified to manage their own encryption scheme.
What the nerds should want is only to be able to set up their own encryption key management if they feel it's necessary. Similar to the way many people use cloud email services, but you *can* set up your own email server, there should be simple cloud encryption/identity services, but people should still be allowed to set up their own encryption/identity servers.
The second problem is much more difficult. How do you get ubiquitous adoption of security standards where companies have an interest in maintaining incompatibility? I really don't know. One of the historically successful methods of creating an adoption of standards is through some kind of governmental action (either direct regulation, or requirements for government contracts). However, nobody trusts the government to push an encryption scheme, since they only want communication security when they can preserve a backdoor.
It's a shame. We really could do so much better if people weren't such idiots. And the problem isn't that "the common man" is an idiot, but that the people running various companies, and the people running the government, are all a bunch of idiots.
Hopefully this time they don't bail out the banks and and the idiots who bought mcmansions.
And how do you imagine that would work out? If everyone's bank accounts suddenly evaporate, your savings will be gone. And your employer's bank accounts will disappear. And your employer's customers' bank accounts will disappear. And then you have riots in the streets.
I suppose the houses that escape the fires will be cheaper, assuming anyone has money to buy them. You won't be able to get a loan because the banks will be gone, and you'll have no savings, so it's not clear where that money will come from.. And it's not clear what currency anyone will be accepting.
Also, it just doesn't make sense to have "free market" infrastructure. Free markets imply a low barrier to entry, allowing new upstarts to compete. Now think about roads, for example. How many different roads systems does it make sense to have? And no, I'm not asking how many different roads we should have, but different road systems. To make it more clearly, how many different roads should you expect to connect directly to your driveway? The answer is "one", at least under most circumstances.
You can say the same thing about water, electricity, or whatever else. I guess you could say it makes sense to have multiple sources of power generation, but it only makes sense to have one set of electrical cables connecting your apartment to the grid. It only makes sense to have one set of pipes connecting your apartment to a water source.
And Internet is infrastructure. You're never going to have real competition, so a free market can't be the solution.
Yes, if it is Government business. If is GOP/politcal party business, then no.
I bet they're all very discerning about making sure not to conduct the shadier aspects of their government business over the untraceable lines of communication.
I just mentioned this because, at my parents house, the only option was Verizon 3G up until just a couple years ago. These days T-Mobile and Verizon both have LTE, but I don't know if this is that case in more rural areas in general.
The only places they lag behind are on more remote roads (though even there they have improved), and also on things like repeaters in hotel conference areas (I think Version/AT&T have a lot more of those set up).
Also, I didn't read the whole report, but they seem to be saying that T-Mobile is on par with Verizon for LTE coverage. From that information alone, it's possible that Verizon still has better 3G and 2G coverage in rural areas that don't get 4G coverage from anyone.
Right in the summary:
Availability of high-speed data services shows that all four carriers have improved, but T-Mobile (86.6%) is now within two percentage points of Verizon (88.2%) when it comes to finding an LTE signal.
Now that doesn't mean that T-Mobile coverage is as good as Verizon's where you live, but it does indicate that according to this study, T-Mobile's LTE coverage is on par with Verizon's nation wide.
That's nonsense. First, as you said, email is a bit of a gray area because case history is not as established as Fax, but that doesn't mean email is insufficient. They'd been accepting emails already, indicating that email was sufficient for this purpose. We're not talking about signed contracts, just a request for information that people have a legal right to access. If there were some particular security issue, they could add some kind of requirement for email requests (e.g. must be submitted in a webform after verifying your email address, or must contain a valid digital signature).
Unless someone can point to some reason why a simple email is insufficient, this seems suspicious. Considering the context of a new administration that seems intent on violating the Constitution, it's very suspicious indeed.
Unless the company relies on the public good will (which most do to some degree), in which case public image matters, in which case the company might want to at least appear to be concerned with some of those global issues.
Well owners would be concerned with sustainable growth, and therefore they would agree that you have to focus on making the company work by having good employees and attracting customers.
One of the fundamental issues with our economic system relying on publicly traded corporations is that shareholders are not real owners. A lot of shareholders are people who only want *this quarter* to be successful so that the stock will go up, so that they can sell their shares. That's it. They're not necessarily interested in what the company does or how well it does it, but just whether they can sell their shares at a profit tomorrow.
The shareholders aren't owners. They're gamblers.
Also, the even the current goal of most apps is not to develop something useful and lasting. It's to make the new Flappy Bird. Or to make a new social networking app that doesn't offer real benefits over the old one, but it's catchy enough that maybe some teenagers will use it. The eventual goal of these app developers is often not even to create a sustainable company, but just to get purchased by Google.
I wonder if I have this or something like it. I'm definitely sensitive to the sounds of people eating. The personal hell would probably include someone eating really crispy potato chips with their mouth open, licking and smacking their lips. It makes me unjustifiably angry and frustrated. I know my emotional reaction to it isn't proportional to the offense, but it makes me temporarily hate the person who's eating.
I have another weird thing, and I wonder if that might be connected. I wouldn't normally connect it, but if they're saying it's due to a weird response in the brain to sound, maybe it is? Basically, really loud music makes me sleepy. Like, I've gone to punk shows where the music is extremely loud and somewhat grating, and I feel an immediate need to go to sleep. If there's a comfortable place to sit, I might just drift off. As soon as I get out into an environment that's quieter, my energy returns. I'm not sure I noticed it until someone else pointed it out. I've thought that maybe it's like my brain gets overloaded and says, "Nope, this is too much. I'm shutting down."
So now I'm just wondering, maybe I have a generalized thing where my brain is responding strangely to auditory stimuli.
My problem is the hypocrisy and dishonesty
Eh... I'm not sure I buy that. Say what you want, but it's really easy to rationalize some reason to be upset. It's especially stupid to say, "I hate hypocrisy!" because there's so much hypocrisy in the world, and there's no reason why you would pick this example of hypocrisy to get butthurt about.
So what's really upsetting you? Is it the idea that the "leftist nutjobs" are getting away with terrible things? Or is it that other people don't find it acceptable for you to be racist? The more you rationalize, the more it seems like it's the latter.
Sure, "White Supremacists" can be blocked from Reddit, but what about the leftist nutjobs who believe that you should destroy other people's property and physically assault people with a different political viewpoint? I don't look at reddit as a rule, but I'd be willing to bet that extremist left wing groups exist on reddit and will not receive the same treatment as the "alt-right".
Honest question: Which thing is upsetting to you, that "leftish nutjobs" aren't being banned, or that "White Supremacists" are being banned?
Because sometimes I can't really tell, but it seems an awful lot like people are really complaining that they're not being allowed to harass and attack minorities. Like some guy uses the "n-word" and people say that it's not ok, and his response is, "I hear black people say 'honkey' and 'cracker', and nobody yells at them!"
And my thinking is, ok, fine, we can talk about whether it should be ok to use those words, but you're not really complaining about that. You're just using that as an example of perceived unfairness. It really seems to be more about you really wanting to use offensive language to harass minorities, and you don't like being told that it's inappropriate to do so.
I can't think of a public online community that doesn't get abusive at times, but I think websites do need to draw a line somewhere. Like, on one side of the line you have friendliness and puppies, and on the other side you have doxxing and real-life death threats. You've got to draw the line somewhere in between, and I don't know exactly where you want to do that.
I'm not really trying to take sides here, just trying to be fair. In my opinion, if there's a community on reddit that's doxxing people and the moderators aren't even trying to stop it, then that whole subreddit should be banned, regardless of their political affiliations. I'm not aware of what communities you're talking about, or what events in them you're referring to.
Well, apart from Reddit's blindness to comparable content and behaviour from people representing other parts of the political spectrum.
I'm not going to try to judge whether that's a valid criticism since I don't know what you're referring to, but I would point out that Reddit is a private company with no obligation to be unbiased. They might have some reasons to try to be unbiased, but it's not a "freedom of speech" issue either way.
Not that you said it was, but that seems to be where these discussions inevitably go.
I don't think Reddit is trying to destroy these movements. I think they're just refusing to host them.
I think I've seen like 2 of these things, both of them worn by people who work in IT.
I know it's become a bit of a cliche, but I'm reminded of the quote, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I think it's because I had an iPod in 2003, and I remember people thought I was insane. Nobody was buying iPods of Macs. Apple was still a dying company, and OSX was a weak last-ditch effort to stay relevant.
And then I visited NYC... iPods and Macs were all over the place. I went back home, and people still thought the iPod was stupid. Nobody else had them. It was a flop.
A few years later, I bought my brother an iPod as a gift. He didn't know what it was. He lived in a relatively rural area, and had never seen one. Nobody was spending money on iPods. Why wouldn't you just buy CDs like a normal person.
A few years later, my brother called me to ask what I thought about the iPhone. He'd never had a smart phone, and he thought they were stupid, but he knew I had an iPhone, so he wanted to ask. I asked, "Are you thinking of getting one?" He said, "Well, yeah. I know I just said I thought they were stupid, but I'm on my third iPod and I love the thing."
He hasn't been without an iPhone since. The idea of going back to a non-smart-phone seems like nonsense to him, as it does to most of the rest of us.
Now, I'm not saying that the Apple Watch will ever be as successful as the iPod or iPhone, or even the iPad. I'm just saying, a lot can change in a few years. Having lived in NYC for several years now, I've definitely noticed that trends-- even technological trends-- occur in New York before most of the country. I watched iPods and Mac and iPhones gain popularity here while the rest of the country still thought they were weird and obscure. I've gone to the South and the Midwest and seen teenagers wearing "the latest styles", which were what the kids in NYC wore 3 years ago. And right now, I'm seeing a fair number of people wearing smart watches. Some Android watches, but mostly Apple watches.
Well part of the thing is that I do like the service this business provides. I like the owner and I like the people who work there. I have no desire to complain, and I don't want to cause them to think that I'm generally unhappy with the service I've received.
It's just, if I'm being honest, they could improve a little.
I think it's also important to consider that satisfaction surveys tend to suffer from a sort of selection bias. You're only getting feedback from people who feel compelled to give feedback. In my personal experience you'll get:
- Sometimes people who are angry
- Occasional people who are extremely pleased
- Often people who have excessive esteem of their own opinions**
- Rarely people who just want to give helpful feedback
I'm not pointing this out to necessarily disparage these groups or say that their opinions aren't valid, but it's important to understand you're unlikely to get a true random sampling.
**I know someone is going to take issue with my third item, "people who have excessive esteem of their own opinions", so I'll try to explain what I mean by that. Obviously people's opinions are important, or you wouldn't be asking for feedback. And yes, everyone values their opinions more than others'. However, there are some people who... you read their online review, and you can tell that they believe their review will impress everyone and settle all disputes. Like you'll read a negative Yelp review, and the reviewer isn't just saying, "I had an bad experience," or "I didn't like it," but something more like, "This place is simply objectively terrible and though I see other people saying that they like the place, they're all wrong and stupid and not worth listening to." You can almost imagine that they've finished writing the review, leaned back in their chair, and thought, "Well that waiter crossed the wrong person. I expect they'll go out of business any day now."
So my