That is a cognitive dissonance that a healthy mind should not be capable of.
I think my main issue here is that you're stigmatizing religion as a disfunction or disease. If you decided that cognitive dissonance is a disease, something everybody does and really constitutes a fundamental feature of human consciousness, what are you prepared to do to cure it? We lock up people with mental disorders, even those that don't pose an immediate threat to themselves can be involuntarily committed for violent ideation. Are we going to lock up the religious? The veneration of the crucifix is violent ideation, maybe we should lock Christians up?
While we're at it, the Bible clearly is central to the spread of this "meme," it's little more than a viral creche, so we should burn them? People who publicly speak of their beliefs are also disease vectors should also be contained, yes?
I get your (nominal) commitment to reason, but what about your commitment to freedom of thought and expression? That something is "illogical" is never sufficient ground to censure it. You cast your definition so broadly that I doubt the world you propose could sustain any kind of faith, or most forms of art, or even most kinds of moral philosophy. Ironically, this sort of thinking takes you to Marxism-Leninism, and its prohibitions on religion, in favor of its own privileged definitions of "rationality."
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
So basically, you've stripped every concrete, commonsense dictionary definition out of religion in order to make it conform to your understanding of Stalinism. You've made your definition of religion so broad and post-modern that it robs it of any usefulness. Apply your definition to Stalinism and it's a religion, apply it to Catholicism and it's a religion, apply it to the Atkins diet, Apple fanboys, manual transmission drivers and Parade magazine subscribers and behold, all of these suddenly become religions.
This is the typical pose of the ignorant atheist -- "religion is anything other people fall for."
Religion is fundamentally a memetic complex that takes advantage of the mental illness of faith to infect and compromise the minds of a population.
I'm not religious, or faithful, or anything, but I know bigotry when I see it, and saying religious people are "mentally ill" or "compromised" is bigotry.
What makes Stalinism and Maoism a religion? They aren't spiritual, they have no creation story, no afterlife, and they make scant demands on faith. Maoism has no scientistic dogma that I'm aware of, and while could Stalinism demand the obedience of scientists, the actual dogma they were supposed to support was arbitrary and could change on a whim.
Neither Stalinism and Maoism has a consistent set of beliefs about the cosmos, aside from a belief in the historical imperative of Communism, and even that was deeply shaded by both Mao's and Stalin's rejection of world revolution as an ideological goal. Just because people are forced to memorize the Little Red Book, this does not make that book "religious," particularly when that book is full of expositions on humanist and materialist philosophy. If Mao's writings are religious, then so are Hegel's.
There's also the little problem of Stalinism and Maoism lacking a God or Gods, or having novel rituals for the dead, rituals for marriage or birth. And then there's also the problem that nobody actually believes in either of these anymore, even in the course of their own lifetime. Religions aren't a fad, they don't just burn into popularity over the course of a decade and then suddenly disappear, leaving even the believers bewildered and in denial. That's just not what a religion is. That's sort of the biggest case against these being a religion -- what little people did believe of them, they accepted on account of constant, terrible coercion. Once the threat disappeared, so did all the mental furniture. Religions don't work like that, people accept religion freely and without duress, given the definitions of these within the prevailing cultural hegemony. (This is actually a pretty good reason to believe Scientology isn't a religion, either.)
There are plenty of reasons to hate Maoism and Stalinism without tarring it as religious, and plenty of reasons to hate religion without tarring it by association with the Great Leap Forward. Your use of the terminology is overkill.
Hitler was never elected chancellor of Germany, he was never on a proper ballot, and his party never won a mandate.
Hitler lost his bid for Reich President in 1932 to Hindenburg; in the following year, Reichstag elections were held twice, but no party or coalition was able to secure enough votes to form a government. The Nazis never held a majority, at their greatest extent they only controlled a third of the legislature, and over 1932 their support had begun to weaken.
At that juncture, in January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor by dint of Hindenburg's presidential emergency powers. The Reichstag fire happened the next month, the Socialist and Communist parties were banned, and only then, with half the Resichstag in jail, did the Nazis manage to win a majority.
Hitler rose to power "legally," but that does not mean he was elected or even legitimate. Sorry, I get annoyed when people repeat this old line.
Stalin and Mao fair enough but how can you justify pegging Hitler as an atheist?
It's a very fraught issue:
Hitler was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, as most Austrians of his generation were.
Hitler formed his original governing coalition with the German Catholic Centre party. His vice-chancellor, Franz Von Papen, got his job as vice-chancellor as a condition of the Centre supporting Hitler's government. Of course, once the Reichstag was set on fire, Hitler no longer needed the Centre party and dumped them.
The Third Reich had an official "Reich Bishop," a protestant evangelical, albeit one utterly committed to Nazism. The autonomy of churches themselves was highly circumscribed, and pastors, bishops, and priests were constantly being thrown in concentration camps for stepping beyond political bounds.
Hitler famously concluded a treaty with the Pope, essentially securing the Vatican's acquiescence over mistreatment of its ordinaries and laity. In all his interactions with church authority, catholic or otherwise, the goal was primarily to preserve the silence of the faithful at all costs, and to obtain their obedience if possible and necessary.
In his adult life Hitler confessed to a sort of non-denominational Christianity; he stated that he believed Jesus was a militant who was the first Aryan to take up the struggle against the Jews(!). His beliefs on this "positive Christianity" prefigure the Christian Identity movement.
Hitler attacked Communism explicitly on the basis of its atheism. He cast German, Nazi culture as superior because it had Christianity.
There's little evidence Hitler went in for all the mystical teutonic crap that people like Himmler seemed to dig. On the other hand, Hitler absolutely indulged in veneration of the dead and attaching religious significance to racial ideas.
Some Nazis, from time to time, would deface or attach church property, and some of the wilder types proposed banning the church or hanging swastikas from the cathedral spires. There is some evidence that Hitler himself saw this as the endgame for religion in the Third Reich, because he ultimately saw the abandonment of Judeo-Christian ethics as necessary, but concrete steps taken by him in his lifetime are scant.
He certainly was religious, he called himself a Christian, but no non-racist Christian nowadays (and most racist ones) would recognize him as one. His religion certainly didn't motivate him, I don't think we can't put the Holocaust, let alone the 15 million or so Russian civilians murdered by the Germans, up on the deaths-caused-by-religion tote board.
Stalin had stated that he was an atheist in his adult life, but he was raised orthodox and showed a certain fealty to christian folk traditions, even if he wasn't willing to admit it. For example, it was he who had Lenin embalmed, in an effort to exploit (or just realize) an old Russian orthodox belief that the body of saint did not putrefy.
Stating outright that Stalin "believed in the cult" of his own personality is pretty nonsensical: of course he didn't worship himself, and all the evidence we have indicates that he lived in a state of constant terror and paranoia that he would be betrayed by the most loyal people around him. The people that knew him and immediately surrounded him certainly didn't believe he was divine or divinely inspired, even the generation of leaders he found to replace the first generation that he'd had killed.
Also the comparison of Stalin's cult to any religious faith is pretty offensive to religion, let alone other personality cults. Stalin's cult died with him, it had none of the staying power of even Kim Il-Sung cult of personality, which still burns bright.
A cult != a charismatic "cult of personality" != a totalitarian movement != religion != "faith".
People are constantly trying to stick all of these on a continuum, mainly so they can tar anyone who isn't as atheist as them, but they all significantly differ in kind. Lumping them all together significantly reduces our understanding of the world and how people really are.
"Slide to unlock" is a user interface convention, not an invention.
While I don't think any patent on a slide-to-unlock widget should prevail, regardless of who claims it, I don't understand how it could be described as "obvious" or "conventional" when people had been making touchscreen handheld devices for a decade prior and had never used it. "Obvious in retrospect" isn't the same as "obvious".
As far as VLC is concerned, the DRM issue is mostly a red herring, unless you accept that decorating a binary with DRM is a violation of paragraph 6 of GPL v2.0. This is essentially what the GNU claimed when they had GNU Go pulled from the App Store.
According to their interpretation, distribution of a binary through the App Store compels sub-licensing as specified under paragraph 6, thus any encumbrance on someone copying/modifying/whatever an app they received from the app store, mechanical (through DRM) or legal (through the App Store Terms of Service) constitutes an imposition of "further restrictions." Their position is that the original distribution at time of purchase is governed by restrictions in the TOS, and thus taints the entire transaction, even though the source code of the distribution is publicly available and can be compiled by anyone onto any computing platform they wish, complying with whatever terms they wish.
The GNU thus attempts to thread v3.0's more hardware-demanding restrictions through the eye of the GPL v2.0 needle. My personal opinion is that a developer's compliance with paragraph 6 should be evaluated relative to the most permissive terms he offers for the source; he may offer the source or a binary through a more restrictive medium, but as long as he offers a distribution that meets the conditions of paragraph 6, he's in compliance. The GPL doesn't see it that way, however, and simply states that GPL code may not pass through any medium that imposes any restriction -- and in this way, they seem to be much more concerned with how developers money and do business than with how people acquire, use, learn from and share code.
Note also that paragraph 6 only encumbers re-distributors. Someone with original copyright on a work, like our Mr. Denis-Courmont, is not bound by it. Granted he's using GPL code in his product, thus redistributing that code, and if those developers were to register a complaint, he would be bound to respect it.
Depends on the GPL version; the iOS App Store is perfectly GPL 2.0 compliant, as long as a distributor of software provides their source upon demand, they are fulfilling their terms under Section 3, paragraph b. Several iOS developers distribute GPL software, such as Doom, this way. VLC is distributed under GPL 2.0.
The GNU, unfortunately, promotes an intentionally obtuse interpretation of paragraph 6 of the v2.0 license, and only uses this interpretation when attacking software on the iOS App Store; it's happy to turn a blind eye to Android phone and tablet vendors who violate the GPL, mainly for strategic reasons.
I suspect this is really another patent fight over Codecs used or worked around by VLC, and the Google Market (play store) is making sure they don't end up on the wrong side of the MPAA, (not to mention trying to keep Google's YOUTube ox from being gored.
I seem to recall Apple had no problem posting VLC on the App store, until one of VLC's copyright holders (and, in what I am sure was a complete coincidence, a Nokia employee) demanded it be taken down.
Over the past few years we really have seen the collapse of "convergence." Instead of one thing that does everything, companies have been more apt to sell us a Katamari Damacy-esque ball of appliances that talk to each other over protocols, collaborating with dumb devices, providing redundant services to smart ones, cacheing, mirroring, and smarting-up things that everyone thought would be wholly replaced.
One the one hand, no one company or consortium was ever able to get in a position where they could make a play to replace so many things at once with one thing. In the other, miniaturization hasn't lead to a world with few, small, expensive, super-powerful devices that do everything, but to many, tiny, cheap, marginally smart devices, tailored to specific ends.
Now Democratic politics, internal and external, are almost entirely based on dividing people into tribes by race, gender, etc. and voting along those lines.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The divergence of interests along cultural and (more saliently) class lines among American voters isn't some sort of conspiracy the Democratic party invented at a conference circa 1992 -- or do you think half of the American people are so stupid that some guy can stand up at a podium, tell them that rich whitey bible thumper is out to get them, and they blindly accept it? Do you really believe men are so craven, or that masses so foolish, or that this behavior is (conveniently) exclusive to people you happen to disagree with?
Even better, if someone doesn't think they're getting fair shake for any reason, do you expect them to roll over and play dead because their problem doesn't meet some cultural authoritarian's sufficiently patriotic standard of a legit grievance? People fight for what they think is right, and if they think they're getting a shitty deal because they're black, or poor, or blue collar, or non-protestant, you should expect that this opinion comes from personal experience and first-hand knowledge. Democrats lost middle class white males for a generation by condescending to their legit concerns, it's no surprise that Republican condescension to the concerns of African-Americans, immigrants, women and the educated produces the same result.
Alas, I'm not sure any of this applies to the Democratic party, so wrapped up in the rentier economic power structure they are, I'm not sure they'd know how to exploit a 10-man hotel workers strike, let alone nationalized, concerted communities of interests, like "tribes" as you put it -- a clumsy use of this term, meant to demean people as savage or uncivilized, for having the gall to disagree with you and vote that way.
Of course there are other details to consider, by running as an R he didn't have to spend much on the primary and could avoid the pandering to the base required to secure the nomination, making the win in the general a lot simpler since he didn't have to weasel out of those positions.
I admit strategically it was a good idea, mainly because the conservative Republican voting constituency in the City is impotent and ineffectual, and given New York's rules for party balloting and conservative's preference there to run under a "Conservative" banner. A jungle primary in the district probably would have accomplished the same end.
He was a Democrat in NYC his entire life; right up until he wanted to run for mayor and hit the cold hard reality that as a Jew he had zero chance of winning as a D in that city and suddenly became a Republican.
I guess the Democratic affiliation of Ed Koch and Abe Beame are just figments of my imagination.
I didn't ask when he was a Democrat, or a progressive, I asked when he was a liberal.
If someone wants to hack at Michael Bloomberg for being pro-choice but anti-48 oz., have at it, but the argument's probably not going to impress most New Yorkers.
If the playing field of democracy does not involve consistency in some ways, why even bother to take part and not simply blow evil people's heads off?
Assuming we take the Hobbesian view that everyone is an animal and out to maximize their own estate and crush everyone that opposes them, then yes. However, people don't actually behave this way.
People don't respect the life and property of others because it's consistent with the philosophical system of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, they do it because they're decent and civilized.
Not sure how that "experiment"in American manufacturing is going to work out, considering one of the major complaints is that it is over-priced compared to similar items - roku, apple tv, xbox/ps3.
Being overpriced is just the most noticeable difference; since it's American-sourced, it'll also be the first Internet STB that leaks oil and burns out its clutch after 15000 miles.
What I said amounts to: for them to survive, they'll need to find a niche;
I think you've got it backwards, the retail strategy isn't the problem -- BB still has healthy sales, particularly outside the US and in the lesser-developed markets, but their sale price per handset and their profit margins have been declining for years.
Handsets is a design and supply chain business. Samsung owns it own chip foundries, self-sources most of its own components and does a lot of its own manufacturing; Apple makes big capital plays and corners the markets in high-end materials, components and inputs, and funnels them through one of the deepest and most efficiently managed manufacturing supply chain in the business.
There are still plenty of BB customers out there but BB never made the transition from being a singular prestige brand to being in a competitive environment. Samsung was always in that position and Apple has learned so many lessons over years of screwing up they were ready when competitors came looking for them.
My problem is not liberal ideals (which are mostly good). It's the fact they don't live up to them. They claim "We are a pro-choice party," and then turn around and take away freedom of choice by banning sodas (New York), movie theater popcorn (effective 2013), and catastrophic insurance plans (under obamacare).
I think you attach too much meaning to ideology. It doesn't work that way. You can be a dweeb and nail everybody to the wall for being "hypocritical" but it's completely unproductive and ignores the fact that laws are passed by people who are elected by people, and are meant to address political demands. They know they're not being consistent and they don't care. Consistency is for restaurants and Nazis.
I'm sorry if you've misappropriated one slogan on one issue ("pro-choice") and decided to use it as some sort of predicate to judge every policy objective leftists have. There are any number or rightist slogans ("limited government", "fiscal responsibility", "sacredness of life") that are similarly fraught. That's just how it works -- healthy people don't join political movements for ideology, they join them to accomplish common goals through collective action.
Where exactly do you think the poor are being "shuffled" now? EMTALA forbids hospitals from rejecting patients on the basis of ability to pay.
The PPACA changes Medicare reimbursements from "volume of treatment" formula to a "quality of care" formula on January 1, 2015. The law does not change Medicare eligibility to "include more poor people," it does however raise Medicaid eligibility to people making 133% of the poverty level, though the court's ruling today put enforcement of that law into question, since Medicaid is administered by the states.
Odds are your taxes will go up to support enforcing this program, as will your health insurance costs as they struggle to compete with it.
Compete with what? There is no public option.
Also, when companies compete, that makes prices go down. It's quality that suffers. See: airlines.
The CBO and most independent analysis says that the outlays of the federal government will decrease under the ACA, compared to the baseline case, mainly because most people agree the community rating, state insurance exchanges, and changing medicare reimbursement rules to pay for quality and not volume, will restrain price inflation and thus reduce Medicare reimbursements. Wether taxes go up or down is a separate question.
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I think my main issue here is that you're stigmatizing religion as a disfunction or disease. If you decided that cognitive dissonance is a disease, something everybody does and really constitutes a fundamental feature of human consciousness, what are you prepared to do to cure it? We lock up people with mental disorders, even those that don't pose an immediate threat to themselves can be involuntarily committed for violent ideation. Are we going to lock up the religious? The veneration of the crucifix is violent ideation, maybe we should lock Christians up?
While we're at it, the Bible clearly is central to the spread of this "meme," it's little more than a viral creche, so we should burn them? People who publicly speak of their beliefs are also disease vectors should also be contained, yes?
I get your (nominal) commitment to reason, but what about your commitment to freedom of thought and expression? That something is "illogical" is never sufficient ground to censure it. You cast your definition so broadly that I doubt the world you propose could sustain any kind of faith, or most forms of art, or even most kinds of moral philosophy. Ironically, this sort of thinking takes you to Marxism-Leninism, and its prohibitions on religion, in favor of its own privileged definitions of "rationality."
Don't you think that's a little reductive?
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
So basically, you've stripped every concrete, commonsense dictionary definition out of religion in order to make it conform to your understanding of Stalinism. You've made your definition of religion so broad and post-modern that it robs it of any usefulness. Apply your definition to Stalinism and it's a religion, apply it to Catholicism and it's a religion, apply it to the Atkins diet, Apple fanboys, manual transmission drivers and Parade magazine subscribers and behold, all of these suddenly become religions.
This is the typical pose of the ignorant atheist -- "religion is anything other people fall for."
I'm not religious, or faithful, or anything, but I know bigotry when I see it, and saying religious people are "mentally ill" or "compromised" is bigotry.
What makes Stalinism and Maoism a religion? They aren't spiritual, they have no creation story, no afterlife, and they make scant demands on faith. Maoism has no scientistic dogma that I'm aware of, and while could Stalinism demand the obedience of scientists, the actual dogma they were supposed to support was arbitrary and could change on a whim.
Neither Stalinism and Maoism has a consistent set of beliefs about the cosmos, aside from a belief in the historical imperative of Communism, and even that was deeply shaded by both Mao's and Stalin's rejection of world revolution as an ideological goal. Just because people are forced to memorize the Little Red Book, this does not make that book "religious," particularly when that book is full of expositions on humanist and materialist philosophy. If Mao's writings are religious, then so are Hegel's.
There's also the little problem of Stalinism and Maoism lacking a God or Gods, or having novel rituals for the dead, rituals for marriage or birth. And then there's also the problem that nobody actually believes in either of these anymore, even in the course of their own lifetime. Religions aren't a fad, they don't just burn into popularity over the course of a decade and then suddenly disappear, leaving even the believers bewildered and in denial. That's just not what a religion is. That's sort of the biggest case against these being a religion -- what little people did believe of them, they accepted on account of constant, terrible coercion. Once the threat disappeared, so did all the mental furniture. Religions don't work like that, people accept religion freely and without duress, given the definitions of these within the prevailing cultural hegemony. (This is actually a pretty good reason to believe Scientology isn't a religion, either.)
There are plenty of reasons to hate Maoism and Stalinism without tarring it as religious, and plenty of reasons to hate religion without tarring it by association with the Great Leap Forward. Your use of the terminology is overkill.
Hitler was never elected chancellor of Germany, he was never on a proper ballot, and his party never won a mandate.
Hitler lost his bid for Reich President in 1932 to Hindenburg; in the following year, Reichstag elections were held twice, but no party or coalition was able to secure enough votes to form a government. The Nazis never held a majority, at their greatest extent they only controlled a third of the legislature, and over 1932 their support had begun to weaken.
At that juncture, in January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor by dint of Hindenburg's presidential emergency powers. The Reichstag fire happened the next month, the Socialist and Communist parties were banned, and only then, with half the Resichstag in jail, did the Nazis manage to win a majority.
Hitler rose to power "legally," but that does not mean he was elected or even legitimate. Sorry, I get annoyed when people repeat this old line.
It's a very fraught issue:
He certainly was religious, he called himself a Christian, but no non-racist Christian nowadays (and most racist ones) would recognize him as one. His religion certainly didn't motivate him, I don't think we can't put the Holocaust, let alone the 15 million or so Russian civilians murdered by the Germans, up on the deaths-caused-by-religion tote board.
Stalin had stated that he was an atheist in his adult life, but he was raised orthodox and showed a certain fealty to christian folk traditions, even if he wasn't willing to admit it. For example, it was he who had Lenin embalmed, in an effort to exploit (or just realize) an old Russian orthodox belief that the body of saint did not putrefy.
Stating outright that Stalin "believed in the cult" of his own personality is pretty nonsensical: of course he didn't worship himself, and all the evidence we have indicates that he lived in a state of constant terror and paranoia that he would be betrayed by the most loyal people around him. The people that knew him and immediately surrounded him certainly didn't believe he was divine or divinely inspired, even the generation of leaders he found to replace the first generation that he'd had killed.
Also the comparison of Stalin's cult to any religious faith is pretty offensive to religion, let alone other personality cults. Stalin's cult died with him, it had none of the staying power of even Kim Il-Sung cult of personality, which still burns bright.
A cult != a charismatic "cult of personality" != a totalitarian movement != religion != "faith".
People are constantly trying to stick all of these on a continuum, mainly so they can tar anyone who isn't as atheist as them, but they all significantly differ in kind. Lumping them all together significantly reduces our understanding of the world and how people really are.
While I don't think any patent on a slide-to-unlock widget should prevail, regardless of who claims it, I don't understand how it could be described as "obvious" or "conventional" when people had been making touchscreen handheld devices for a decade prior and had never used it. "Obvious in retrospect" isn't the same as "obvious".
As far as VLC is concerned, the DRM issue is mostly a red herring, unless you accept that decorating a binary with DRM is a violation of paragraph 6 of GPL v2.0. This is essentially what the GNU claimed when they had GNU Go pulled from the App Store.
According to their interpretation, distribution of a binary through the App Store compels sub-licensing as specified under paragraph 6, thus any encumbrance on someone copying/modifying/whatever an app they received from the app store, mechanical (through DRM) or legal (through the App Store Terms of Service) constitutes an imposition of "further restrictions." Their position is that the original distribution at time of purchase is governed by restrictions in the TOS, and thus taints the entire transaction, even though the source code of the distribution is publicly available and can be compiled by anyone onto any computing platform they wish, complying with whatever terms they wish.
The GNU thus attempts to thread v3.0's more hardware-demanding restrictions through the eye of the GPL v2.0 needle. My personal opinion is that a developer's compliance with paragraph 6 should be evaluated relative to the most permissive terms he offers for the source; he may offer the source or a binary through a more restrictive medium, but as long as he offers a distribution that meets the conditions of paragraph 6, he's in compliance. The GPL doesn't see it that way, however, and simply states that GPL code may not pass through any medium that imposes any restriction -- and in this way, they seem to be much more concerned with how developers money and do business than with how people acquire, use, learn from and share code.
Note also that paragraph 6 only encumbers re-distributors. Someone with original copyright on a work, like our Mr. Denis-Courmont, is not bound by it. Granted he's using GPL code in his product, thus redistributing that code, and if those developers were to register a complaint, he would be bound to respect it.
Depends on the GPL version; the iOS App Store is perfectly GPL 2.0 compliant, as long as a distributor of software provides their source upon demand, they are fulfilling their terms under Section 3, paragraph b. Several iOS developers distribute GPL software, such as Doom, this way. VLC is distributed under GPL 2.0.
The GNU, unfortunately, promotes an intentionally obtuse interpretation of paragraph 6 of the v2.0 license, and only uses this interpretation when attacking software on the iOS App Store; it's happy to turn a blind eye to Android phone and tablet vendors who violate the GPL, mainly for strategic reasons.
I seem to recall Apple had no problem posting VLC on the App store, until one of VLC's copyright holders (and, in what I am sure was a complete coincidence, a Nokia employee) demanded it be taken down.
Instead of the squishy Apple-ism of "less is more," the Nexus Q is perhaps "less is less."
The solution to "too many remotes" is neither "buy a $300 remote," nor "iPhone and dumbphone owners need not apply."
Over the past few years we really have seen the collapse of "convergence." Instead of one thing that does everything, companies have been more apt to sell us a Katamari Damacy-esque ball of appliances that talk to each other over protocols, collaborating with dumb devices, providing redundant services to smart ones, cacheing, mirroring, and smarting-up things that everyone thought would be wholly replaced.
One the one hand, no one company or consortium was ever able to get in a position where they could make a play to replace so many things at once with one thing. In the other, miniaturization hasn't lead to a world with few, small, expensive, super-powerful devices that do everything, but to many, tiny, cheap, marginally smart devices, tailored to specific ends.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The divergence of interests along cultural and (more saliently) class lines among American voters isn't some sort of conspiracy the Democratic party invented at a conference circa 1992 -- or do you think half of the American people are so stupid that some guy can stand up at a podium, tell them that rich whitey bible thumper is out to get them, and they blindly accept it? Do you really believe men are so craven, or that masses so foolish, or that this behavior is (conveniently) exclusive to people you happen to disagree with?
Even better, if someone doesn't think they're getting fair shake for any reason, do you expect them to roll over and play dead because their problem doesn't meet some cultural authoritarian's sufficiently patriotic standard of a legit grievance? People fight for what they think is right, and if they think they're getting a shitty deal because they're black, or poor, or blue collar, or non-protestant, you should expect that this opinion comes from personal experience and first-hand knowledge. Democrats lost middle class white males for a generation by condescending to their legit concerns, it's no surprise that Republican condescension to the concerns of African-Americans, immigrants, women and the educated produces the same result.
Alas, I'm not sure any of this applies to the Democratic party, so wrapped up in the rentier economic power structure they are, I'm not sure they'd know how to exploit a 10-man hotel workers strike, let alone nationalized, concerted communities of interests, like "tribes" as you put it -- a clumsy use of this term, meant to demean people as savage or uncivilized, for having the gall to disagree with you and vote that way.
I admit strategically it was a good idea, mainly because the conservative Republican voting constituency in the City is impotent and ineffectual, and given New York's rules for party balloting and conservative's preference there to run under a "Conservative" banner. A jungle primary in the district probably would have accomplished the same end.
I guess the Democratic affiliation of Ed Koch and Abe Beame are just figments of my imagination.
I didn't ask when he was a Democrat, or a progressive, I asked when he was a liberal.
If someone wants to hack at Michael Bloomberg for being pro-choice but anti-48 oz., have at it, but the argument's probably not going to impress most New Yorkers.
Assuming we take the Hobbesian view that everyone is an animal and out to maximize their own estate and crush everyone that opposes them, then yes. However, people don't actually behave this way.
People don't respect the life and property of others because it's consistent with the philosophical system of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, they do it because they're decent and civilized.
Being overpriced is just the most noticeable difference; since it's American-sourced, it'll also be the first Internet STB that leaks oil and burns out its clutch after 15000 miles.
I think you've got it backwards, the retail strategy isn't the problem -- BB still has healthy sales, particularly outside the US and in the lesser-developed markets, but their sale price per handset and their profit margins have been declining for years.
Handsets is a design and supply chain business. Samsung owns it own chip foundries, self-sources most of its own components and does a lot of its own manufacturing; Apple makes big capital plays and corners the markets in high-end materials, components and inputs, and funnels them through one of the deepest and most efficiently managed manufacturing supply chain in the business.
There are still plenty of BB customers out there but BB never made the transition from being a singular prestige brand to being in a competitive environment. Samsung was always in that position and Apple has learned so many lessons over years of screwing up they were ready when competitors came looking for them.
Because if there's any business more profitable than mobile phones it's computer hardware! /s
I think you attach too much meaning to ideology. It doesn't work that way. You can be a dweeb and nail everybody to the wall for being "hypocritical" but it's completely unproductive and ignores the fact that laws are passed by people who are elected by people, and are meant to address political demands. They know they're not being consistent and they don't care. Consistency is for restaurants and Nazis.
I'm sorry if you've misappropriated one slogan on one issue ("pro-choice") and decided to use it as some sort of predicate to judge every policy objective leftists have. There are any number or rightist slogans ("limited government", "fiscal responsibility", "sacredness of life") that are similarly fraught. That's just how it works -- healthy people don't join political movements for ideology, they join them to accomplish common goals through collective action.
And since when was Michael Bloomberg a liberal?
Medicare, Tricare, VA?
Where exactly do you think the poor are being "shuffled" now? EMTALA forbids hospitals from rejecting patients on the basis of ability to pay.
The PPACA changes Medicare reimbursements from "volume of treatment" formula to a "quality of care" formula on January 1, 2015. The law does not change Medicare eligibility to "include more poor people," it does however raise Medicaid eligibility to people making 133% of the poverty level, though the court's ruling today put enforcement of that law into question, since Medicaid is administered by the states.
Compete with what? There is no public option.
Also, when companies compete, that makes prices go down. It's quality that suffers. See: airlines.
The CBO and most independent analysis says that the outlays of the federal government will decrease under the ACA, compared to the baseline case, mainly because most people agree the community rating, state insurance exchanges, and changing medicare reimbursement rules to pay for quality and not volume, will restrain price inflation and thus reduce Medicare reimbursements. Wether taxes go up or down is a separate question.