I didn't try to explain you why you're wrong on this subject. I explained to you why no-one is interested in explaining to you why you're wrong on this subject any more.
Of course, no-one really owes you an explanation, anyway. I didn't even owe that one; I just did it out of the kindness of my heart.
We don't know if the deal was fair or not, because we haven't yet paid the full price for it.
With coal and oil, we had essentially found a credit card that we assumed was unlimited, or at least close enough for any practical purposes, and we've been using it to buy all kinds of stuff. A lot of it was useful stuff that made our lives better, no doubt about that. A lot of it was excessive luxuries. A lot, outright waste.
But we're only now starting to get the first bills for all those purchases. What the final one will look like, remains to be seen.
We tried. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, because they have deeply held political and/or ideological beliefs that are directly contradicted by the evidence that we present, and so the evidence gets rejected.
Also, in the age of the Internet, finding and validating such evidence generally isn't hard, especially for something that is so widely known to begin with. So the default assumption shifts from ignorance to malice. I'm not going to take time explaining a flat-earther why they're wrong, when evidence to the contrary is available on every corner. Same thing here.
I have to say, I just added/. to the AdBlock exclusion list, just to see what ads I'll get, and I'm impressed.
I'm seeing two ads at the top of the page, both of which are relevant to my interests - guns and hiking gear. The latter is, in fact, specifically for a product that I wanted to buy for a while, and was looking for a good deal for, and it offers a discount. No sale this time because they don't have the desired size/color, but still, this gets my nod of approval (and a bit of unease because of how accurate it is).
So, thumbs up from this Slashdot user, and I think I'll keep the exclusion.
And yes, agree 100%, quit annoying the piss out of us and we'll stop blocking the ads. There's a few easy gimmies right off the blocks, the animated ads that start talking to you or the popover ads, those are just a few asshats really dragging the advertisers' images thorugh the mud. Things get only slightly better from there, going to a page to read a short 4 paragraph article that has been carved into 9 pieces across 9 pages, and displayed in the middle of each page, surrounded by ads. I don't have much pity for them either.
Suppose there's one website, or even one advertising network, that decided to do that.
What are the consequences? Well, because you're using an adblocker that blocks all ads, you won't actually notice it, and they won't get any more income from you than they did before.
On the other hand, for people who don't block ads (most of which simply don't know they can), I very much doubt they will see any positive outcome; more likely, quite the opposite. Those obnoxious, flashy ads are designed that way for a reason - because they do actually work, statistically speaking, and looking at click ratios.
So our moral advertiser sees income dry up, and go out of business.
And meanwhile, you're still using an adblocker - all that they did, did not change your behavior in the slightest, because you simply didn't observe it.
So, why should any advertiser do what you tell them to do?
All of this stupid "take it from the rich" rhetoric ignores the fact that the rich can actually defend themselves. They have political influence to distort legislation can craft loopholes for themselves. They can also pay for hired guns to help get them from under any measures that are actually passed. This is why they are rich in the first place.
No amount of hired guns can save you from a populist revolution. Only concessions can.
When the degree of automation gets high enough that we will have steady two-digit unemployment, it'll be either welfare or pitchforks. Smart capitalists prefer to pay people off, which is exactly what UBI is, if you think about it. That's exactly why you see this experiment funded by private money.
And the stupid capitalists end up on the literal, not figurative, pitchforks. See also: Russia 1917.
It's not a given that UBI is even more expensive than all the current welfare schemes combined, if it replaces them. We spend a lot of money on bureaucracy alone, to figure out who "deserves" a welfare check - and keep piling on with inane ideas such as mandatory drug tests. A simple scheme where everyone just gets a cut is vastly easier and cheaper to maintain, and offers less opportunity for corruption etc.
It can also be used to simplify the tax code by ditching progressive taxation altogether. If everyone gets such a check, and only get taxed on income above and beyond it, that's effectively progressive taxation by itself, with a smooth distribution curve rather than brackets.
Socialism rests on the idea that the economic pie is static and can't grow and thus one group can acquire all the stuff
It doesn't, actually. It rests on the idea that produced wealth is finite, and thus one group can appropriate it all. That the first part is true is trivially demonstrable. That the second part is true is obvious when you look at real income vs productivity growth over the past few decades.
Automation is nothing new, indeed. As you point out yourself, it wiped out jobs before. What was different is that there were other jobs to be filled, and usually in roughly the same niche (i.e. a blue collar worker would still be a blue collar worker).
What's different now is that we're running out of places to shift people who are doing those jobs that will be made redundant by further automation.
Comparing Germany to India doesn't really make much sense, because it's apples to oranges - the two countries have vastly different quality of life levels. In other words, the workers in Germany produce more abstract wealth per capita than the workers in India. Comparing employment rates thus doesn't make much sense, because the amount produced is different.
Oh, and there's another thing that's "different" (but actually similar to what we've seen before). While productivity is skyrocketing, the extra wealth produced by that increased productivity is not actually distributed to those people who implement it, by and large. Last time this was happening was late 19th century, and the result was a series of socialist and communist uprisings around the world, and evolution into some sort of welfare state (New Deal etc) in countries that were not affected by those revolutions, but didn't want to be next in line. It can be argued that we're on the verge of a similar thing right now, and UBI is a logical remedy.
The absence of a hard and fast rule about how long cops should wait before entering is surely the responsibility of the legislature, is it not?
It is insofar as they have a responsibility to write constitutional laws. But they can't set it arbitrarily - if the Congress were to say that knocking and waiting for 1 second before entering makes it not "no-knock" any longer, that doesn't really make it so automatically.
And in the absence of such legislation, it's up to the Supreme Court to define boundaries - and it is their obligation to do so in a way that makes some sense. The way they defined it so far (and not only Scalia is culpable, mind you) is such that it torn down a lot of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to protect.
Actually, at least in part, they will be. If we let them go free, it sets a precedent for future cases that if you violate the rules to gather evidence, the evidence cannot be used for anything meaningful. That, in turn, means that police themselves will avoid these means of gathering evidence.
Both you and OP are falling to the same common "but he deserved it" fallacy. A lot of people had the same "epiphany" with torture 9/11 - yeah, sure, it's a bad thing and constitution prohibits it, but these guys deserve it, and we're still not torturing the good guys, so it's all right.
Well, it's not. For starters, you don't know who the good guys and who the bad guys are, in advance. Fourth Amendment and other protections apply on this stage to ensure that the process of determining guilt is due and impartial. But furthermore, once you provide a loophole to use it "just for the bad guys", that loophole will be used for everyone.
Consider what the effect of the ruling actually is. It makes it so that police can turn any regular warrant into a no-knock warrant - I mean, they might as well 0.1 seconds for all anyone cares. And even if it's too short, so what? The evidence is all admissible, and otherwise Scalia says that officers will receive such reprimands as issued by the police department... which, you guessed it, is none.
And if you don't see a problem with no-knock warrants in general, I would suggest reading about some SWAT horror stories that result from that. And - since you're a Scalia supporter, and hence a purported "originalist" - look up when no-knock warrants first appeared.
The point is that Senate majority leader has said that they don't want to confirm anyone until after the elections. So there's no-one that Obama could offer even in theory. There's no room for negotiation there.
No. It would make them sentient dolphins, not "non-human people".
Whatever you want to call them - do you think that they would not be entitled to, at the minimum, a right to life to the same degree as humans (i.e. killing them should be treated as murder)?
If so, then what determines who has that right and who doesn't? Sentience? But zygotes aren't sentient.
Easy peasy!
23 chromosomes is a normal number for humans, but not all humans have 23 chromosomes - Down syndrome, XYY males and XXX females etc.
Ultimately, all this is just accumulated mutations and selection of them over the course of that 6 million years of divergence. By itself, that's still a quantitative difference, not qualitative - i.e. we know that things are different, sure, but they're also different between humans on genetic level. The question is, what exactly about those missing or extra chromosomes and DNA difference is responsible for having or not having natural rights? If you could incrementally edit a chimp's genome to make it human, at which point during the process is it "human enough"?
Anyone intelligent enough to post on/. is intelligent enough to know that half the DNA isn't enough.
Enough for what? To eventually grow a human, sure. But to be a person? I don't know.
Thus, if self-awareness is the measure of humanity/personhood, it's just as ok to "put down" an eighteen month old human as it is to kill an unwanted dog.
You're correct - i.e. logically speaking, either both are okay, or neither is okay.
Or, possibly, the definition of "person" is more extensive than self-awareness. But I still don't see why it should have anything to do with DNA makeup.
I fail to see the difference between the two.
It's because the definition of "person" is not strict, and for most people who haven't given it consideration, it's basically "I know it when I see it". However, surely you can imagine a hypothetical non-human person, even under whatever subjective definition you subscribe to? E.g. suppose we do determine that dolphins are "intelligent enough", after all, and devise means to communicate with them with a full-fledged language - would that not make them persons?
"Human", on the other hand, is defined entirely in strict biological terms. It's still not a strict definition if you consider corner cases (which extinct hominids were human and which weren't, for example? and at which point the result of our future evolution can no longer be called "human" and becomes a different species?), but for practical purposes, you can just do a DNA test.
Where did I indicate such a thing???
You indicated that natural rights belong to humans, and humans are defined by DNA. I don't see why such differentiation by DNA is fundamentally different from differentiating within homo sapiens sapiens by DNA; the only difference is degree. Just as you can determine the difference between humans and chimps by comparing their genes, so you can determine the difference between different human populations by looking at some genetic markers or others (and yes, there are some that correlate pretty well with black skin, for example).
And don't pretend like the fact that one case straddles species boundary and the other one doesn't makes a huge difference - "species" themselves are a rather arbitrary human construct stemming from our desire to neatly label and categorize everything, but nature doesn't really care about such things. If you want to talk about objective facts, you'll have to show a difference in quality rather than quantity of differences (or demonstrate that some quantity is a threshold meaningful for some reason other than "because I said so").
It is relevant, because with it you boil the argument down to objective facts instead of philosophical and socio-political arguments.
You can't boil the argument down without agreeing on what the argument is about. This particular one is whether personhood or humanity is the defining factor for possessing natural rights, including right to life. Yes, if you arbitrarily resolve this question in favor of humanity, then you can boil it down to objective facts - DNA etc. But that first decision is arbitrary, and not everyone agrees to it.
People don't tend to stay at those places long, but if you haven't been able to get other work it can help pay bills until you can.
Swiping wallets from tourists at a busy attraction can also help you pay the bills until you can, but I don't think that's a valid argument in favor of the person doing so.
Answer, part #1: Because the the human brain develops naturally from that zygote.
Sure, but why start with zygote? Why not the egg? Why not before? Any point in this chain is pretty arbitrary, and even if you pick one (like you did with "has its own DNA"), it's not clear what it has to do with personhood.
Answer, part #2: Babies with severe microcephaly have no self-awareness, but are still humans.
Sure. And it's a valid question to ask whether they should have the same rights as a self-aware human being. Ditto for braindead people.
Because their DNA is not human.
But then you're not basing your definition of rights on whether someone is a person or not. You're basing it on whether they're human or not (or rather - because there isn't really a hard delimiter between species in general - on whether someone is "sufficiently human"). I don't see why this is, in principle, any better than denying on a scattering of other genetic markers that correspond to dark skin etc.
Biology is irrelevant here, because it does not really concern itself with issues such as "personhood" and "natural rights".
So self-awareness, and brain in general, is not required to be a person?
Why aren't animals persons, then, and why don't they get all the same rights that a person should? Just because they have a wrong DNA? Does it also apply to humans with "the wrong DNA" (e.g. not sufficiently white)?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't try to explain you why you're wrong on this subject. I explained to you why no-one is interested in explaining to you why you're wrong on this subject any more.
Of course, no-one really owes you an explanation, anyway. I didn't even owe that one; I just did it out of the kindness of my heart.
We don't know if the deal was fair or not, because we haven't yet paid the full price for it.
With coal and oil, we had essentially found a credit card that we assumed was unlimited, or at least close enough for any practical purposes, and we've been using it to buy all kinds of stuff. A lot of it was useful stuff that made our lives better, no doubt about that. A lot of it was excessive luxuries. A lot, outright waste.
But we're only now starting to get the first bills for all those purchases. What the final one will look like, remains to be seen.
We tried. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, because they have deeply held political and/or ideological beliefs that are directly contradicted by the evidence that we present, and so the evidence gets rejected.
Also, in the age of the Internet, finding and validating such evidence generally isn't hard, especially for something that is so widely known to begin with. So the default assumption shifts from ignorance to malice. I'm not going to take time explaining a flat-earther why they're wrong, when evidence to the contrary is available on every corner. Same thing here.
Of course they're not qualified! That's exactly why they ask experts, just as you have recommended.
And the results of those inquiries are reflected in their rates.
I have to say, I just added /. to the AdBlock exclusion list, just to see what ads I'll get, and I'm impressed.
I'm seeing two ads at the top of the page, both of which are relevant to my interests - guns and hiking gear. The latter is, in fact, specifically for a product that I wanted to buy for a while, and was looking for a good deal for, and it offers a discount. No sale this time because they don't have the desired size/color, but still, this gets my nod of approval (and a bit of unease because of how accurate it is).
So, thumbs up from this Slashdot user, and I think I'll keep the exclusion.
And yes, agree 100%, quit annoying the piss out of us and we'll stop blocking the ads. There's a few easy gimmies right off the blocks, the animated ads that start talking to you or the popover ads, those are just a few asshats really dragging the advertisers' images thorugh the mud. Things get only slightly better from there, going to a page to read a short 4 paragraph article that has been carved into 9 pieces across 9 pages, and displayed in the middle of each page, surrounded by ads. I don't have much pity for them either.
Suppose there's one website, or even one advertising network, that decided to do that.
What are the consequences? Well, because you're using an adblocker that blocks all ads, you won't actually notice it, and they won't get any more income from you than they did before.
On the other hand, for people who don't block ads (most of which simply don't know they can), I very much doubt they will see any positive outcome; more likely, quite the opposite. Those obnoxious, flashy ads are designed that way for a reason - because they do actually work, statistically speaking, and looking at click ratios.
So our moral advertiser sees income dry up, and go out of business.
And meanwhile, you're still using an adblocker - all that they did, did not change your behavior in the slightest, because you simply didn't observe it.
So, why should any advertiser do what you tell them to do?
You call it "spam", yet every single article from PVS that I've seen anywhere always points out actual code defects in real world projects.
You mean, the rich can afford to pay the poor to manufacture the killer robots...
There is a slight problem in that plan, however.
All of this stupid "take it from the rich" rhetoric ignores the fact that the rich can actually defend themselves. They have political influence to distort legislation can craft loopholes for themselves. They can also pay for hired guns to help get them from under any measures that are actually passed. This is why they are rich in the first place.
No amount of hired guns can save you from a populist revolution. Only concessions can.
When the degree of automation gets high enough that we will have steady two-digit unemployment, it'll be either welfare or pitchforks. Smart capitalists prefer to pay people off, which is exactly what UBI is, if you think about it. That's exactly why you see this experiment funded by private money.
And the stupid capitalists end up on the literal, not figurative, pitchforks. See also: Russia 1917.
It's not a given that UBI is even more expensive than all the current welfare schemes combined, if it replaces them. We spend a lot of money on bureaucracy alone, to figure out who "deserves" a welfare check - and keep piling on with inane ideas such as mandatory drug tests. A simple scheme where everyone just gets a cut is vastly easier and cheaper to maintain, and offers less opportunity for corruption etc.
It can also be used to simplify the tax code by ditching progressive taxation altogether. If everyone gets such a check, and only get taxed on income above and beyond it, that's effectively progressive taxation by itself, with a smooth distribution curve rather than brackets.
Socialism rests on the idea that the economic pie is static and can't grow and thus one group can acquire all the stuff
It doesn't, actually. It rests on the idea that produced wealth is finite, and thus one group can appropriate it all. That the first part is true is trivially demonstrable. That the second part is true is obvious when you look at real income vs productivity growth over the past few decades.
Automation is nothing new, indeed. As you point out yourself, it wiped out jobs before. What was different is that there were other jobs to be filled, and usually in roughly the same niche (i.e. a blue collar worker would still be a blue collar worker).
What's different now is that we're running out of places to shift people who are doing those jobs that will be made redundant by further automation.
Comparing Germany to India doesn't really make much sense, because it's apples to oranges - the two countries have vastly different quality of life levels. In other words, the workers in Germany produce more abstract wealth per capita than the workers in India. Comparing employment rates thus doesn't make much sense, because the amount produced is different.
Oh, and there's another thing that's "different" (but actually similar to what we've seen before). While productivity is skyrocketing, the extra wealth produced by that increased productivity is not actually distributed to those people who implement it, by and large. Last time this was happening was late 19th century, and the result was a series of socialist and communist uprisings around the world, and evolution into some sort of welfare state (New Deal etc) in countries that were not affected by those revolutions, but didn't want to be next in line. It can be argued that we're on the verge of a similar thing right now, and UBI is a logical remedy.
The absence of a hard and fast rule about how long cops should wait before entering is surely the responsibility of the legislature, is it not?
It is insofar as they have a responsibility to write constitutional laws. But they can't set it arbitrarily - if the Congress were to say that knocking and waiting for 1 second before entering makes it not "no-knock" any longer, that doesn't really make it so automatically.
And in the absence of such legislation, it's up to the Supreme Court to define boundaries - and it is their obligation to do so in a way that makes some sense. The way they defined it so far (and not only Scalia is culpable, mind you) is such that it torn down a lot of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to protect.
Actually, at least in part, they will be. If we let them go free, it sets a precedent for future cases that if you violate the rules to gather evidence, the evidence cannot be used for anything meaningful. That, in turn, means that police themselves will avoid these means of gathering evidence.
Both you and OP are falling to the same common "but he deserved it" fallacy. A lot of people had the same "epiphany" with torture 9/11 - yeah, sure, it's a bad thing and constitution prohibits it, but these guys deserve it, and we're still not torturing the good guys, so it's all right.
Well, it's not. For starters, you don't know who the good guys and who the bad guys are, in advance. Fourth Amendment and other protections apply on this stage to ensure that the process of determining guilt is due and impartial. But furthermore, once you provide a loophole to use it "just for the bad guys", that loophole will be used for everyone.
Consider what the effect of the ruling actually is. It makes it so that police can turn any regular warrant into a no-knock warrant - I mean, they might as well 0.1 seconds for all anyone cares. And even if it's too short, so what? The evidence is all admissible, and otherwise Scalia says that officers will receive such reprimands as issued by the police department... which, you guessed it, is none.
http://object.cato.org/sites/c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
And if you don't see a problem with no-knock warrants in general, I would suggest reading about some SWAT horror stories that result from that. And - since you're a Scalia supporter, and hence a purported "originalist" - look up when no-knock warrants first appeared.
Name a decision where Scalia made peoples' lives worse, and wasn't following the Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The point is that Senate majority leader has said that they don't want to confirm anyone until after the elections. So there's no-one that Obama could offer even in theory. There's no room for negotiation there.
No. It would make them sentient dolphins, not "non-human people".
Whatever you want to call them - do you think that they would not be entitled to, at the minimum, a right to life to the same degree as humans (i.e. killing them should be treated as murder)?
If so, then what determines who has that right and who doesn't? Sentience? But zygotes aren't sentient.
Easy peasy!
23 chromosomes is a normal number for humans, but not all humans have 23 chromosomes - Down syndrome, XYY males and XXX females etc.
Ultimately, all this is just accumulated mutations and selection of them over the course of that 6 million years of divergence. By itself, that's still a quantitative difference, not qualitative - i.e. we know that things are different, sure, but they're also different between humans on genetic level. The question is, what exactly about those missing or extra chromosomes and DNA difference is responsible for having or not having natural rights? If you could incrementally edit a chimp's genome to make it human, at which point during the process is it "human enough"?
Anyone intelligent enough to post on /. is intelligent enough to know that half the DNA isn't enough.
Enough for what? To eventually grow a human, sure. But to be a person? I don't know.
Thus, if self-awareness is the measure of humanity/personhood, it's just as ok to "put down" an eighteen month old human as it is to kill an unwanted dog.
You're correct - i.e. logically speaking, either both are okay, or neither is okay.
Or, possibly, the definition of "person" is more extensive than self-awareness. But I still don't see why it should have anything to do with DNA makeup.
I fail to see the difference between the two.
It's because the definition of "person" is not strict, and for most people who haven't given it consideration, it's basically "I know it when I see it". However, surely you can imagine a hypothetical non-human person, even under whatever subjective definition you subscribe to? E.g. suppose we do determine that dolphins are "intelligent enough", after all, and devise means to communicate with them with a full-fledged language - would that not make them persons?
"Human", on the other hand, is defined entirely in strict biological terms. It's still not a strict definition if you consider corner cases (which extinct hominids were human and which weren't, for example? and at which point the result of our future evolution can no longer be called "human" and becomes a different species?), but for practical purposes, you can just do a DNA test.
Where did I indicate such a thing???
You indicated that natural rights belong to humans, and humans are defined by DNA. I don't see why such differentiation by DNA is fundamentally different from differentiating within homo sapiens sapiens by DNA; the only difference is degree. Just as you can determine the difference between humans and chimps by comparing their genes, so you can determine the difference between different human populations by looking at some genetic markers or others (and yes, there are some that correlate pretty well with black skin, for example).
And don't pretend like the fact that one case straddles species boundary and the other one doesn't makes a huge difference - "species" themselves are a rather arbitrary human construct stemming from our desire to neatly label and categorize everything, but nature doesn't really care about such things. If you want to talk about objective facts, you'll have to show a difference in quality rather than quantity of differences (or demonstrate that some quantity is a threshold meaningful for some reason other than "because I said so").
It is relevant, because with it you boil the argument down to objective facts instead of philosophical and socio-political arguments.
You can't boil the argument down without agreeing on what the argument is about. This particular one is whether personhood or humanity is the defining factor for possessing natural rights, including right to life. Yes, if you arbitrarily resolve this question in favor of humanity, then you can boil it down to objective facts - DNA etc. But that first decision is arbitrary, and not everyone agrees to it.
People don't tend to stay at those places long, but if you haven't been able to get other work it can help pay bills until you can.
Swiping wallets from tourists at a busy attraction can also help you pay the bills until you can, but I don't think that's a valid argument in favor of the person doing so.
It's all great, but none of this explains why they completely shut down everything if the only faulty part is the sensor.
You might as well just replace it with another phone (with a native sensor and a software-based keylogger) if you're doing this kind of stuff.
Because if you RTFA, it actually specifically excludes US citizens.
Answer, part #1: Because the the human brain develops naturally from that zygote.
Sure, but why start with zygote? Why not the egg? Why not before? Any point in this chain is pretty arbitrary, and even if you pick one (like you did with "has its own DNA"), it's not clear what it has to do with personhood.
Answer, part #2: Babies with severe microcephaly have no self-awareness, but are still humans.
Sure. And it's a valid question to ask whether they should have the same rights as a self-aware human being. Ditto for braindead people.
Because their DNA is not human.
But then you're not basing your definition of rights on whether someone is a person or not. You're basing it on whether they're human or not (or rather - because there isn't really a hard delimiter between species in general - on whether someone is "sufficiently human"). I don't see why this is, in principle, any better than denying on a scattering of other genetic markers that correspond to dark skin etc.
Biology is irrelevant here, because it does not really concern itself with issues such as "personhood" and "natural rights".
So self-awareness, and brain in general, is not required to be a person?
Why aren't animals persons, then, and why don't they get all the same rights that a person should? Just because they have a wrong DNA? Does it also apply to humans with "the wrong DNA" (e.g. not sufficiently white)?