one of the greats complains I hear is that NO ONE want's these new features that Google keeps pushing with each version of their hardware
It doesn't help that most of the new features seem to be there for the benefit of Google and other ad-slingers, not the customer; they require Google accounts, location reporting, trackers running all the time and so on. I may be more privacy aware than other people, but I have pretty much stopped adding more apps (pretty much all require too many permissions), and am only using the phone for basic tasks, like voice calls, contact list, calendaring and light web browsing (contacts and calendar items get synchronized via USB, not Google, and browsing is done via Firefox with ublock Origin and Ghostery). My next phone will either be a basic feature phone or maybe an iPhone.
Wonder how they train this pseudo-AI to recognize what hate crime is. Humans can't really reliably do it, it's always a judgment call very much biased by the individual person's view, especially political views.
The problem has been solved long ago; all Google has to do is to follow the lessons of their illustrious predecessors in the promotion of right thinking:
There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents. We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.
Nikolai Yezhov, People's Comissar for Internal Affairs and head of the NKVD
Just flag it as hate anyway - you can be sure somebody somewhere will be offended.
Maul halten und weiter dienen - as they used to tell us in the army. That's the best and finest thing of all.
(That translates more or less as "shut up and get on with the job"). Of course, that was in the army, but in the civilian world, I think you'd make a great Dolores Umbridge.
Because, as we know, every poor person has well-to-do friends or family whose only purpose in life is to help them. To give them shelter if they're homeless, feed them of they're hungry and perform surgery on them if they're sick. And if they die, it's proof positive they were abusive people and didn't deserve to live anyway. Thus the free market saves society the cost of judging and executing those abusers! Is there anything the free market can't do?
Leftism is the idea that government can be used to solve practically any problem.
That's not correct, but let's go with this for now. By extension then, "rightism" would be the idea that the free market can be used to solve practically any problem. Let's see how this solves the problems you posted:
Are there people who are hungry and can't get food?
They have to offer something to the free market; otherwise they can't buy food for themselves or their children. If they can't offer something (maybe they're sick, too young, lack skills, or maybe the market isn't in a great state) they starve and the problem solves itself - no more hungry people!
Are there people who can't afford housing?
The free market solves this problem easily: homeless people can either die or, as an alternative be jailed in for-profit prisons for loitering, sleeping under bridges, and so on. Either solution solves the homeless problem in a nice market-driven way.
Do you really think the free-market solutions to your problems are better?
Almost all Leftists are Klepotocrats.
That's... rather silly. You may as well say almost all rightists are oligarchists, and they long to be led by a handful of billionaires - who are obviously their betters, or else they wouldn't be billionaires, now would they?
Curmudgeony old coots, accurately calling out pie-in-the-sky bullshit
Yeah, I remember for example Slashdot calling Apple on their pie-in-the-sky bullshit iPod when it first launched. Boy, was that an accurate call and no mistake!
There is no such thing as "free content." At the very least, content costs their bandwidth. If they were interested in serving you content without ads, they would offer a subscription (that you wouldn't pay for).
First, it's not my obligation to support their flawed business model. If their content was interesting enough, I'd pay for a subscription. And I have no sympathy for complaints about the cost of bandwidth either, when it's 99% the web developer's fault. A simple page on a news site may have one or two kilobytes of useful text; however, it downloads megabytes of unnecessary frameworks, scripts, CSS, images, videos, and kitchen sinks. Lazy or incompetent coders cost the content provider, but I don't see why it's my problem.
Second, I believe your argument boils down to an implicit contract that exists between me and a web site, where the site provides some content, and I pay for it by viewing some ads. But ad networks (and therefore the websites showing the ads) are abusing the implicit contract: instead of limiting themselves to showing ads, they double dip by tracking me over multiple sites, logging any and all of my data they can get their grubby hands on, and selling it to all and sundry. This was certainly not part of my understanding of the implicit contract. So, sorry, I'm not buying into your argument (and not allowing any ads either).
if they can stop the worst abuse then advertising might remain a viable way to pay for web content.
The issue I have is that advertising (especially Google advertising) has become so mixed with tracking and egregious privacy invasion that I don't see how the two can be split apart again. I have no guarantee the ad slinger won't also drop a cookie, log my IP or use any of so many other mechanisms to follow me around the internet and spy on all my actions.
If companies (again, especially Google) wouldn't track, I would probably be fine with simple non overly annoying ads or with "sponsored links". Since they do, I won't accept any ads, period.
For sweeping all the crimes of the Bush administration under the rug in the name of some Pollyannesque idea that Republicans will work with him for the good of America. That showed an amazing lack of awareness and judgement. The same Kumbaya approach was visible during the Obamacare negotiations and led to the Republicans' effective sabotage of the law.
The first thing Obama should have done is start a hundred investigations - into the reasons why America was pushed into a catastrophic war by a lying administration, into the staggering incompetent way post-war Iraq and Afghanistan were handled (for example, investigate how the Republican governor of Iraq was named based on party loyalty, not on competence), on the incredible waste of money (billions of dollars, literally pallets of cash, were sent to Iraq and vanished). America needed and deserved this cleaning process, and it was Obama's duty, as president, to shine a light into all this morass. If the Republican party had been properly slapped at this time, if half of the Bush administration had been jailed as they so richly deserved, we would all have been better off.
For every one person working their ass off, two to three people can play games, smoke weed and have babies.
I think you nailed the problem: indeed, there should be nobody having to work their ass off. The work needed for sustaining human lives needs to be done mostly by machines. People will only work their ass off if that's what they really want, and not because the alternative is die of hunger.
Theoretically, this can work; getting there however would be difficult. Existing structures and ideologies will resist changes. It may sound difficult to believe, but I even think some folks will insist people should waste their lives in the drudgery of pointless boring "work", as if this is somehow morally better than letting them chose to live their lives as they want to (like, for example, playing games).
I don't think people will give up their choices and agree to a government-only answer to save 13-1.5=11.5%. Do you think they will?
Obviously they will, or at least a great many of them will. That's the problem for health insurers (and, by extension for the Republican party). If they wouldn't, why would both of them fight so hard to stop people from doing exactly that?
[People] can decide for themselves what they're ok with.
But that's the thing, they aren't allowed to decide. The option to go on Medicare is being taken from them by force of law. They are left with no choice but pay the insurance company.
I don't care whether the health industry makes a profit or not. If they can find a business model that serves them while not lowering the health of citizens, more power to them. I do care however that they inject themselves into the discussion and twist legislation in directions that make them money, not in directions that make people healthy. Their interest is to make the biggest possible profit (which is fair, that's the essence of capitalism). The interest of the country is to have the best overall health. Those two interests don't align though - in some cases they're in complete opposition, for example in what regards preexisting conditions. The fate of the health insurance industry should carry very little weight into this discussion; instead, they wield a disproportionate amount of influence, because, unfortunately, Republicans fight on the side of insurance companies. That's the issue. All the claptrap about choices and stuff is diversion.
...the overhead of private insurance companies is about 13% in the USA.
And that's 2 or 3 years worth of inflation in health care. Do you think you can get voters to give up all their choices for a 3 year interruption in cost increases?
I'm not sure I'm parsing your response correctly, but are you saying that the high overhead of 13% doesn't matter, because the low overhead solution will get to the same price in three years due to inflation? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Or are you saying that people should be ok with paying more, because they get "choices", whatever those are? Obviously you bought into the Republican propaganda - "choices" are another one of the Republicans' talk points, and, like most others, just a distraction. If people cared about "choices", extending Medicare to everybody would not cause any problem, as long as people can opt out and go into the more expensive private insurance system. If, as Republicans say, people care most about "choices", then everybody would use private insurance, and would be willing to pay the overheads. But Republicans don't allow this to happen. Oh, no! On the contrary, they fought tooth and nail against one-payer, fought tooth and nail against the expansion of Medicare, and, with the "Trumpdon'tcare" act are doing their best to remove the Medicare option and give everybody just two choices: pay into the racket or die. Do you know why? Because the "choices" thing is just another lie. You, were obviously conned into believing this, but the health industry and Republican congressmen know very well that very few people would actually choose the private solution. Evidently, that would devastate the health insurance industry, and that's why Republicans are so against Medicare expansion. They don't give an airborne sexual act for the health of the people they represent, but are really sensitive to the needs of their corporate masters.
Government agencies aren't known for controlling overhead costs.
Well, we could perhaps look at some studies, instead of relying on simplistic Republican slogans. This study calculates the overhead due to billing and insurance-related costs to 375 billion dollars annually; if Medicare was universal, the savings would be enough to cover all the uninsured and improve coverage for the under-insured. The overhead cost of Medicare is estimated to 1.5% in the USA, 1.8% in Canada. By contrast, the overhead of private insurance companies is about 13% in the USA, 16% in Canada.
Even leaving this aside, there is a much more important issue here. The whole debate is about the wrong thing. The goal of a health care system is not to make money. It is to improve health. Lawmakers' focus should not be on finding ways to protect the income of insurance companies. They should try to find ways to improve the health of citizens. Whether insurance companies go bankrupt, need to change their business model or stop making ridiculous profits should be totally irrelevant. I believe lawmakers who instead perpetuate the current system are fundamentally betraying the reason they were put there in the first place.
Have no doubt, the data you think they're collecting is only a tiny fraction of the data they have on you. We found out recently they're also collecting data from credit card companies, and be sure they're matching them against all your documents, shopping lists, calendar items, all those apparently innocuous snippets of data you're letting them see.
In reality you're part of the problem. Google can point to you and others like you and say "see, most people are OK with our terms of service". They can use this to argue whatever way they come up with to destroy our privacy even further is acceptable under "community standards", and shouldn't be regulated or legislated against. The ones of us who do care about our privacy are left with no options.
You means besides demonstrating they still have decency, character, and a backbone?
Republican voters don't care about any of that. They care about "not giving in to the enemy". The thing to understand though, is that in the Republican worldview "the enemy" is not Russia. It is "the liberal agenda", in its various aspects: gay marriage, global warming, pollution, regulation. This was pumped into their brains by years and years of exposure to Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys and others ejusdem farinae. Selling America to Russia or Saudi Arabia is not betrayal, since Putin is seen as a natural ally against the "liberal agenda". Impeaching Trump however, would be betrayal of the Republican ideals.
Except that is what people said last time, and the time before that.
That makes sense. That things happened a certain way in the past is an ironclad guarantee they will do the same in the future. Well then, no need to look into this anymore, is there?
Hey, don't knock Norton Commander. It still is the best UI I've seen for working with files and folders. To tell the truth, I'm still using it, in the guise of Total Commander.
Heh; FORTRAN, punched cards. I was in eighth grade or thereabouts and a friend let me run some programs on his university's 7040. Tremendous fun until I ran a program simulating a Turing machine and it printed a few hundred pages on their line printer; that got me banned.
Slashdot Mirror
YOU get the notification?!? GOTCHA!!
Well, obviously, he also intercepts the neighbor's e-mail - I mean, doesn't everybody?
one of the greats complains I hear is that NO ONE want's these new features that Google keeps pushing with each version of their hardware
It doesn't help that most of the new features seem to be there for the benefit of Google and other ad-slingers, not the customer; they require Google accounts, location reporting, trackers running all the time and so on. I may be more privacy aware than other people, but I have pretty much stopped adding more apps (pretty much all require too many permissions), and am only using the phone for basic tasks, like voice calls, contact list, calendaring and light web browsing (contacts and calendar items get synchronized via USB, not Google, and browsing is done via Firefox with ublock Origin and Ghostery). My next phone will either be a basic feature phone or maybe an iPhone.
Wonder how they train this pseudo-AI to recognize what hate crime is. Humans can't really reliably do it, it's always a judgment call very much biased by the individual person's view, especially political views.
The problem has been solved long ago; all Google has to do is to follow the lessons of their illustrious predecessors in the promotion of right thinking:
There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents. We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.
Nikolai Yezhov, People's Comissar for Internal Affairs and head of the NKVD
Just flag it as hate anyway - you can be sure somebody somewhere will be offended.
And for those driving two seat/six gears in particular, they can remove the turn signals completely...
Even if cultured, we will finally be sure our hot dogs are made of real dog meat.
Heh, that's almost exactly as Svejk put it:
Maul halten und weiter dienen - as they used to tell us in the army. That's the best and finest thing of all.
(That translates more or less as "shut up and get on with the job"). Of course, that was in the army, but in the civilian world, I think you'd make a great Dolores Umbridge.
... because their claims can't stand the light of day.
Because, as we know, every poor person has well-to-do friends or family whose only purpose in life is to help them. To give them shelter if they're homeless, feed them of they're hungry and perform surgery on them if they're sick. And if they die, it's proof positive they were abusive people and didn't deserve to live anyway. Thus the free market saves society the cost of judging and executing those abusers! Is there anything the free market can't do?
Leftism is the idea that government can be used to solve practically any problem.
That's not correct, but let's go with this for now. By extension then, "rightism" would be the idea that the free market can be used to solve practically any problem. Let's see how this solves the problems you posted:
Are there people who are hungry and can't get food?
They have to offer something to the free market; otherwise they can't buy food for themselves or their children. If they can't offer something (maybe they're sick, too young, lack skills, or maybe the market isn't in a great state) they starve and the problem solves itself - no more hungry people!
Are there people who can't afford housing?
The free market solves this problem easily: homeless people can either die or, as an alternative be jailed in for-profit prisons for loitering, sleeping under bridges, and so on. Either solution solves the homeless problem in a nice market-driven way.
Do you really think the free-market solutions to your problems are better?
Almost all Leftists are Klepotocrats.
That's... rather silly. You may as well say almost all rightists are oligarchists, and they long to be led by a handful of billionaires - who are obviously their betters, or else they wouldn't be billionaires, now would they?
VT-52 green is a wonderful fashion statement
Curmudgeony old coots, accurately calling out pie-in-the-sky bullshit
Yeah, I remember for example Slashdot calling Apple on their pie-in-the-sky bullshit iPod when it first launched. Boy, was that an accurate call and no mistake!
There is no such thing as "free content." At the very least, content costs their bandwidth. If they were interested in serving you content without ads, they would offer a subscription (that you wouldn't pay for).
First, it's not my obligation to support their flawed business model. If their content was interesting enough, I'd pay for a subscription. And I have no sympathy for complaints about the cost of bandwidth either, when it's 99% the web developer's fault. A simple page on a news site may have one or two kilobytes of useful text; however, it downloads megabytes of unnecessary frameworks, scripts, CSS, images, videos, and kitchen sinks. Lazy or incompetent coders cost the content provider, but I don't see why it's my problem.
Second, I believe your argument boils down to an implicit contract that exists between me and a web site, where the site provides some content, and I pay for it by viewing some ads. But ad networks (and therefore the websites showing the ads) are abusing the implicit contract: instead of limiting themselves to showing ads, they double dip by tracking me over multiple sites, logging any and all of my data they can get their grubby hands on, and selling it to all and sundry. This was certainly not part of my understanding of the implicit contract. So, sorry, I'm not buying into your argument (and not allowing any ads either).
if they can stop the worst abuse then advertising might remain a viable way to pay for web content.
The issue I have is that advertising (especially Google advertising) has become so mixed with tracking and egregious privacy invasion that I don't see how the two can be split apart again. I have no guarantee the ad slinger won't also drop a cookie, log my IP or use any of so many other mechanisms to follow me around the internet and spy on all my actions.
If companies (again, especially Google) wouldn't track, I would probably be fine with simple non overly annoying ads or with "sponsored links". Since they do, I won't accept any ads, period.
Be angry at Obama for WHAT?
For sweeping all the crimes of the Bush administration under the rug in the name of some Pollyannesque idea that Republicans will work with him for the good of America. That showed an amazing lack of awareness and judgement. The same Kumbaya approach was visible during the Obamacare negotiations and led to the Republicans' effective sabotage of the law.
The first thing Obama should have done is start a hundred investigations - into the reasons why America was pushed into a catastrophic war by a lying administration, into the staggering incompetent way post-war Iraq and Afghanistan were handled (for example, investigate how the Republican governor of Iraq was named based on party loyalty, not on competence), on the incredible waste of money (billions of dollars, literally pallets of cash, were sent to Iraq and vanished). America needed and deserved this cleaning process, and it was Obama's duty, as president, to shine a light into all this morass. If the Republican party had been properly slapped at this time, if half of the Bush administration had been jailed as they so richly deserved, we would all have been better off.
There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
For every one person working their ass off, two to three people can play games, smoke weed and have babies.
I think you nailed the problem: indeed, there should be nobody having to work their ass off. The work needed for sustaining human lives needs to be done mostly by machines. People will only work their ass off if that's what they really want, and not because the alternative is die of hunger.
Theoretically, this can work; getting there however would be difficult. Existing structures and ideologies will resist changes. It may sound difficult to believe, but I even think some folks will insist people should waste their lives in the drudgery of pointless boring "work", as if this is somehow morally better than letting them chose to live their lives as they want to (like, for example, playing games).
I don't think people will give up their choices and agree to a government-only answer to save 13-1.5=11.5%. Do you think they will?
Obviously they will, or at least a great many of them will. That's the problem for health insurers (and, by extension for the Republican party). If they wouldn't, why would both of them fight so hard to stop people from doing exactly that?
[People] can decide for themselves what they're ok with.
But that's the thing, they aren't allowed to decide. The option to go on Medicare is being taken from them by force of law. They are left with no choice but pay the insurance company.
I don't care whether the health industry makes a profit or not. If they can find a business model that serves them while not lowering the health of citizens, more power to them. I do care however that they inject themselves into the discussion and twist legislation in directions that make them money, not in directions that make people healthy. Their interest is to make the biggest possible profit (which is fair, that's the essence of capitalism). The interest of the country is to have the best overall health. Those two interests don't align though - in some cases they're in complete opposition, for example in what regards preexisting conditions. The fate of the health insurance industry should carry very little weight into this discussion; instead, they wield a disproportionate amount of influence, because, unfortunately, Republicans fight on the side of insurance companies. That's the issue. All the claptrap about choices and stuff is diversion.
...the overhead of private insurance companies is about 13% in the USA.
And that's 2 or 3 years worth of inflation in health care. Do you think you can get voters to give up all their choices for a 3 year interruption in cost increases?
I'm not sure I'm parsing your response correctly, but are you saying that the high overhead of 13% doesn't matter, because the low overhead solution will get to the same price in three years due to inflation? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Or are you saying that people should be ok with paying more, because they get "choices", whatever those are? Obviously you bought into the Republican propaganda - "choices" are another one of the Republicans' talk points, and, like most others, just a distraction. If people cared about "choices", extending Medicare to everybody would not cause any problem, as long as people can opt out and go into the more expensive private insurance system. If, as Republicans say, people care most about "choices", then everybody would use private insurance, and would be willing to pay the overheads. But Republicans don't allow this to happen. Oh, no! On the contrary, they fought tooth and nail against one-payer, fought tooth and nail against the expansion of Medicare, and, with the "Trumpdon'tcare" act are doing their best to remove the Medicare option and give everybody just two choices: pay into the racket or die. Do you know why? Because the "choices" thing is just another lie. You, were obviously conned into believing this, but the health industry and Republican congressmen know very well that very few people would actually choose the private solution. Evidently, that would devastate the health insurance industry, and that's why Republicans are so against Medicare expansion. They don't give an airborne sexual act for the health of the people they represent, but are really sensitive to the needs of their corporate masters.
Government agencies aren't known for controlling overhead costs.
Well, we could perhaps look at some studies, instead of relying on simplistic Republican slogans.
This study calculates the overhead due to billing and insurance-related costs to 375 billion dollars annually; if Medicare was universal, the savings would be enough to cover all the uninsured and improve coverage for the under-insured. The overhead cost of Medicare is estimated to 1.5% in the USA, 1.8% in Canada. By contrast, the overhead of private insurance companies is about 13% in the USA, 16% in Canada.
Even leaving this aside, there is a much more important issue here. The whole debate is about the wrong thing. The goal of a health care system is not to make money. It is to improve health. Lawmakers' focus should not be on finding ways to protect the income of insurance companies. They should try to find ways to improve the health of citizens. Whether insurance companies go bankrupt, need to change their business model or stop making ridiculous profits should be totally irrelevant. I believe lawmakers who instead perpetuate the current system are fundamentally betraying the reason they were put there in the first place.
Have no doubt, the data you think they're collecting is only a tiny fraction of the data they have on you. We found out recently they're also collecting data from credit card companies, and be sure they're matching them against all your documents, shopping lists, calendar items, all those apparently innocuous snippets of data you're letting them see.
In reality you're part of the problem. Google can point to you and others like you and say "see, most people are OK with our terms of service". They can use this to argue whatever way they come up with to destroy our privacy even further is acceptable under "community standards", and shouldn't be regulated or legislated against. The ones of us who do care about our privacy are left with no options.
You means besides demonstrating they still have decency, character, and a backbone?
Republican voters don't care about any of that. They care about "not giving in to the enemy". The thing to understand though, is that in the Republican worldview "the enemy" is not Russia. It is "the liberal agenda", in its various aspects: gay marriage, global warming, pollution, regulation. This was pumped into their brains by years and years of exposure to Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys and others ejusdem farinae. Selling America to Russia or Saudi Arabia is not betrayal, since Putin is seen as a natural ally against the "liberal agenda". Impeaching Trump however, would be betrayal of the Republican ideals.
Except that is what people said last time, and the time before that.
That makes sense. That things happened a certain way in the past is an ironclad guarantee they will do the same in the future. Well then, no need to look into this anymore, is there?
Hey, don't knock Norton Commander. It still is the best UI I've seen for working with files and folders. To tell the truth, I'm still using it, in the guise of Total Commander.
Not while the banks and the Federal Reserve keep creating fiat armchairs out of thin air...
Heh; FORTRAN, punched cards. I was in eighth grade or thereabouts and a friend let me run some programs on his university's 7040. Tremendous fun until I ran a program simulating a Turing machine and it printed a few hundred pages on their line printer; that got me banned.