Like the military fighting WW2 when they were in Viet Nam or staying with a cold war mentality when dealing with insurgencies, big players often tend to focus on the older battlegrounds because they have a kind of institutional inertia due in part to organizational complexi and a difficulty getting established parts of their organization to agree to change course quickly.
Apple has been pretty good at that - smartphones before the iPhone existed, but they moved into that space fast enough, and with a product that was compelling enough and very polished (though not strictly speaking, the first smartphone like it since there was a tiny designer phone out there like it) to become the market. Same with tablets - I tried every other tablet I could find at the time of the IPad 2 launch and nothing came close (though now there are some very good tablets out there that are quite competitive). Same with mp3 players. Same with online music stores.
If Microsoft wants to be innovative and competitive, they will have to get a lot more focused than they are, and they will need to make a true, concerted, company-wide push to make all their products achieve that goal. Jobs and the executive team at Apple was able to do that, but Steve Ballmer is no Steve Jobs, and I seriously doubt the Microsoft executive team is willing to follow him to the cafeteria, let alone into a scary new direction.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me like the only time a new competitor should try to enter an established market for a commodity product would be if that new competitor has some novel way to cut the costs of providing that product or they can add value that the established competitors cannot.
If they can lower the cost of providing the product sufficiently, they would thus be able to survive while the established players take losses that are unsustainable when dropping price. If they can put in an added value that is considered more valuable than the cost savings of buying from an established competitor, they should be able to survive, too.
Eventually the novel lower cost or value added approach would become the new equilibrium as the established players were forced out of the market or forced to adapt, IF the novel approach offered by a new entrant into the market really is valuable.
At least, that's how it seems like it should work?
In any case, it seems to me like an automated system to undercut should probably have multiple levels at which it requires confirmation to go further on something like Amazon, like a penny above the cost of providing the item, and then multiple points below that, or something would require a human to confirm a drop. I'm going to say that the need for speed probably isn't as great on Amazon as it is on the stock markets, so that need for a confirmation probably wouldn't be a make or break moment for a business.
Economics is obviously not my strong suit, so anyone who knows more about this stuff please, feel free to correct me - it's pretty fascinating really.
It isn't a straw man to use your arguments and words against you, and I did not make an ad hominem attack against you.
However, since your opinions on any marriage other than your own (nonexistent) one are completely irrelevant since you are on the losing side of history, and since you steadily refuse to offer any real support for your arguments, I will happily stop bothering with you.
1) Name a single difference that only applies to gay marriage other than the sex of the parties involved.
1a) Explain how, exactly, expanding the definition of marriage to include those differences (including the sex of the parties involved) "debases" marriage (your term) or has any impact on someone who is not involved in that marriage's marriage. Be explicit.
2) It is absolutely relevant. You insisted that gay marriage would "debase" marriage (your word) yet didn't bother to complain about other things that certainly "debase" marriage far more.
3) tell me, will your future wife literally be your property? Will you beat your wife if she disagrees with you? Will you make her father provide a dowry? Will you only marriy a virgin, and will you have her killed if she turns out to not be a virgin intactae? You see, those things, too, have been traditions. I'm sorry, but if you want to argue that tradition somehow is relevant, you can't pick and choose which traditions you want to abide by and which you don't unless i also get to have a say, and i say that if we keep the gender requirement, we also keep the chattel, discipline, and dowry requirements.
Really, though: Society changes. Traditions change. You can still abide, personally, by any traditions you want - by all means, marry a woman! But don't think for a minute that the traditions you value are the same as the ones other people value, and don't think that your desire for tradition overrides someone else's freedom.
3a) Gay people can already get married in several countries and states. So, sorry, chum, but your future marriage has already been "diminished" or "debased." You've lost already, and you aren't even married yet!
3b) People are not wine. An argument that holds for a product does not hold for people. The fact that you even think this is a good analogy is bizarre. Though, I guess maybe not since, as you are a firm advocate of tradition (which thus makes wife and children your property) maybe you do think products and people are one and the same...
Also, you seem to have some idea that advocating for freedoms can be mutually exclusive or oppositional. That is not the case when you take into issues of consent and harm.
If someone with a view I disagree with advocates for freedom and can show it does no harm, I would support their right to advocate since I'm not a hypocrite and in this case their goals and mine coincide.
Finally, stop telling people what they will and won't do.
I support people or companies or anyone advocating for freedom. I do not support people or companies or anyone advocating for restricting freedoms unless those freedoms cause non consensual harm to others.
You are reading my "I support it" as a blanket covering everything, and that is emphatically not what I meant.
I don't get why this is so hard for people to get. Sometimes political action by a business can be good (pushing for more freedom) and sometimes bad (restricting freedom).
1) why do you put protecting a word above the freedoms of other people? You said gay marriage would debase the word marriage - why is that somehow more important than the freedoms of others?
2) why aren't you advocating for an abolition of divorce since surely that debases marriage more than allowing other people into that special club. Or advocating stricter laws for dealing with adulterers, since surely that, too, debases marriage.
And actually, a third question:
3) debase? Really? Is your own marriage so pathetic a sham that people you don't know using the word to describe their own relationship going to make yours worth less? When you introduce people to your spouse are you worried they will think you're both men or both women? Seriously, it's just fucking dumb.
Sports should be segregated based on try-outs and ability, not on gender or sex. While there will be some tendency to stratify based on sex or gender, outliers will be able to find a spot that works for them and gender/sex are removed from the equation.
The opposite argument holds true - this is an augmentation of everyone's rights: now straight people will have more options because whereas before they could only marry a member of the opposite sex, now they can marry anyone who is consenting and capable of consent.
Yay! More freedom for everybody!
Oh, wait, it's a freedom straight people don't want, just like gay people don't want to be able to marry members of the opposite sex? Well, I guess that kind of thing is only a problem when it's something straight people aren't happy about.
I wish people would stop saying that this is just a corporation getting involved in politics, as if, de facto, that is bad.
A company getting involved in politics in order to trample individual rights is bad, but a company getting involved in politics to promote individual rits is good. Just getting political without any differentiation as to why is not inherently a good or bad thing, but HOW they get involved can be good or bad.
An example: I like it when companies give money to groups that help build up the communities they live in and thus promote a better environment for all. So, I like, for example, that Chik Fillet (or however they spell it) gives some money, from what I understand, to schools in their various communities.
But what I find abhorrent is that Chik Fillet gives money to groups fighting against marriage equality.
Gosh, what to do? Well, I could say I don't like it when corporations get political, but that would be dumb. So instead I say "hey, Chik Fillet - keep giving money to schools, but stop giving money to hate groups! If you do that, I will probably become a customer again!"
If you don't like *how* a specific corporation is being political, then tell them, publicize the things they do wrong or that you don't like, and try to get them to change that specific behavior.
But just being all bothered by them being political in the first place seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
This isn't Google being "political" it is instead Google promoting freedom that does not impinge on the rights of others.
I like it when companies promote freedoms that do not impinge on the rights of others. I do not like it when companies try to restrict the rights of others when those rights would do no harm.
So, try seeing a bit of nuance rather than just ominously saying it's political as if it were some kind of monolithic behavior that can't be judged on its own merits.
Just like individual humans, so, too, are corporations able to behave in a myriad of ways, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes both in the same individual or corporation.
To correct your read on hate crimes: the protected class isn't a specific minority, but rather an entire class of behavior.
Sexual orientation is the protected class in this case, so anyone who seeks out a victim based on that victims sexual orientation and who makes it clear that is the reason for the attack can be charged with the aggravated offense.
Same for race, gender and religion - what matters is not the race, gender or religion of the victim, but that the victim was targeted for their race, gender or religion, whatever it may be, and that the attacker demonstrated some evidence to show that it was motivating the attack.
You can have hate crimes perpetrated against someone by a member of the same group; a black guy can be charged with a hate crime if it's shown he was attacking another black guy because of race. Harder to prove, but it has happened.
There is literally nothing in your post that is correct.
Literally every "gay" event I have ever heard of has been more than happy to have straight people there; the term "gay" is often used to say its a safe space, not that it is exclusionary. Do you really think that straight people who are behaving themselves (not being hateful assholes) are being asked to leave or barred from entry? Contrast that with many groups that emphatically will refuse to have gay folk there and will remove them if they're outed. I have literally never heard of someone being removed from a "gay" event for being straight, but even if such things do happen, it's vastly more likely to be the other way around, with gay folk being excluded.
And as for hate crimes, you are ignorant and wrong on that as well. "Gay" is not the protected class, but sexual orientation is. This means that if a black, Muslim lesbian in a wheelchair were to scream "die, breeder, Christian, white man!" while attacking a straight white able-bodied Christian male, she would absolutely be able to be charged with a hate crime.
It isn't the risk of burning off karma you should be worried about, but the fact that you have just demonstrated yourself to be completely ignorant of how the things you are so bothered by actually work. I suggest you take some time to educate yourself rather than remain ignorant and angry.
What, exactly, constitutes abuse in this case and will the people being abused really notice it or think anything of it?
How many customers did Apple lose over antennagate? Not enough to stop the next version of the phone from selling in record numbers even though it was just a minor bump.
Higher prices for limited specs and restricted utility obviously haven't made people stop buying (and the higher price argument is pretty much wrong now, when talking about kit of similar gear), even if the person I initially responded to claims to have a friend who left Macs because of that.
In my experience, and history backs me up on this, abuse needs to be pretty flagrant to get people to notice it, let alone do anything about it. Compared to real corporate abusers out there, Apple is small time to the point where most people can't get worked up about it.
Weird. I know four people who just bought their first Macs because of the new display. Since I have more anecdotal evidence than you, that means Apple is winning.
Seriously, though - nobody but geeks cares if a tech company is abusive. Most people who buy products couldn't care less about Microsoft back when and they couldn't care less about Apple now. Hell, companies have literally killed thousands of people before and nobody except crusaders gave a damn.
This is not to say I think Apple is behaving well, but that unless Tim Cook literally eats a baby during halftime at the Super Bowl not may people will care, and even then probably not for long.
But to say they're losing? They are making vast profits with a higher mark-up on products that really are fairly commodified now... That is hardly losing and that a few nerds are butthurt over their bad behavior isn't gonna change that.
Climb off your cross - nobody's demonizing anything, and you're still wrong.
We know that radio signals can and have been sent from Earth. Some unintentionally, some intentionally.
We don't know that FTL is possible, let alone what the signature might look like.
If I'm going to look for something, I will look for something that I *know* is possible rather than something that I can't prove even exists.
Looking for FTL signatures (whatever those might be) over looking for radio signatures would be like trying to cure cancer with unicorn blood instead of treatments we once used but don't any longer since we've improved our techniques. It's at least feasible that there might be some benefit to one of them since it's been proven that in the past there *was* benefit, but we don't have any idea of what the hell unicorn blood might be.
Also, you're constructing a strawman with your other points: I'm not talking about having a conversation with ET. I'm talking about just finding evidence to suggest ET actually exists. Hundreds of years of lag time between signals isn't relevant to my argument.
And, you're still wrong about how the SETI budget (miniscule as it is) gets spent: It *does* go to refining techniques and looking for other ways to identify ET. We've recently begin to be able to detect "earthish" exo-planets and SETI researchers have *shocker* come up with ways to identify possible sources of life based on chemical instability once we get enough resolution to do real spectrometry. Others are looking for structures in the universe that are simply not reasonable to be natural (mega engineering projects like Dyson Spheres or whatever). Others are looking at optical things like stars being modified to pulse etc.
It's great to have an idea, but to suggest that your idea, which is predicated on some imaginary technology we can't confirm is possible, is just goofy. Now, I will say that the chance we actually find something with SETI as we do it now is really close to zero, but I will say that the chance we find something with your suggested technique is actually zero, since we have no clue what to even begin to look for.
Unless you're talking about looking for gravity waves which, actually, there are experiments looking for gravity waves already (albeit from "natural" sources not ET) to confirm various theories we have.
Personally I am a huge advocate of universal coverage and expanding the idea of preventative approaches to health.
The thing is, I can't say for sure whether it will be more expensive or less expensive to have universal coverage than it would currently. I have an idea that it would ultimately be less expensive overall simply because the rest of the developed world seems to have figured it out. However, the cost, as long as it isn't going to bankrupt us (and there's no reason to think it would) isn't the main consideration - it's the good thing to do, it's the humane thing to do.
That said, on numbers: as I said the numbers on the effectiveness of various elements of coverage are truly complex, there are some very simple and stark numbers: with our current healthcare system we spend more per capita than any other nation, and yet we have overall poorer metrics for health than most other developed nations. This tells me that there is either something fundamentally wrong with Americans that somehow makes our exceptionally diverse population that comes from all over the world more sickly and expensive or that there is something fundamentally wrong with our healthcare system (or maybe both). I don't think that can be in dispute, except by ideologues.
For people in the US who weren't insured before age 65, how many of them have poor health or have had to cope with chronic conditions because they didn't have coverage or weren't able to afford yearly check-ups even if they did, or who weren't able to afford expensive medications to help moderate known conditions?
Because of this lack of preventative care, many of the people who rely on Medicare after 65 have been in pretty bad shape for decades compared to people who had good insurance and who, even after 65, likely still have good coverage and don't rely as much on Medicare.
We also as a nation have higher rates of obesity and other complicating factors that affect a person's health later on in life (and will affect costs associated with that) than many other (most other?) nations.
The numbers are not simple - there are a huge number of factors that go into determining how effective health efforts are, and anyone who pretends like they know the whole story is almost certainly wrong and pushing an agenda.
The problem with your entire post is that you advocate looking for one single (theoretically possible) thing, that Might make a kind of fingerprint that we might be able to detect, but that since we have no idea how to actually make it happen, might also not be anything like we currently imagine it would be because it would require knowledge and capabilities we do not have, do not even know how to get, and MIT be completely wrong about
Over
Looking for MANY different things we not only know are possible, know how to detect, but we have done many of them ourselves and they would absolutely be trivial for a more advanced species to do. we don't know if any of those species *will* do those things, and we don't know if any of those species will do them intentionally designed to be detected, but at least we know those things are practical to do.
Further, let's say there isn't a way to do FTL, period. Let's say that our universe is one in which the detection method you are advocating is simply not physically possible. We might be searching for something absolutely impossible and getting nothing from it. At least with radio based SETI we are searching for things we know are possible and we are basing any optimisim on the idea that maybe one species won't communicate in that way, or maybe a billion will not, but maybe one in a billion will and maybe we will find it.
It's basically the difference between hoping to get super powers from toxic exposure (might not even be possible) vs. hoping to win the lottery (incredibly improbable for an individual but almost a certainty in a large population for at least one to occur)
Further, the tools and techniques developed for SETI are also useful for other problems, and has lead to discoveries in other fields. The tools developed for it are getting more and more sophisticated while still on a budget, which is certainly good.
Further, SETI is so damn inexpensive its silly not to do it, even if it didn't produce any of those added benefits.
Personally, I doubt that SETI will find what it's looking for, and even if it did find a sign of another civilization, it wouldn't get us the encyclopedia galactica or space wiki. But that isn't the real value of SETI, and that isn't why I choose to support it (financially and politically).
It's not a trivial problem, but it's not that difficult - put in systems that broadcast to receivers in cars where they are, put em in the road, put em in traffic lights, put em in whatever is needed.
Roads get rebuilt all the time in places where they have to plow, so it's not a huge issue to put these kinds of things out there as part of the natural infrastructure upgrade.
Further, make autopilot unavailable during horrible conditions or something like that until the infrastructure has been sorted out.
I've thought about this for literally all of the minute or so it took me to read and respond to your post, so I'm sure the people who actually do this for a living probably have thought a bit more about it than either of us.
They said "If you are a betting person" (meaning: if you play the probabilities) you would "increase your odds of becoming a tech executive" (meaning: an executive at a high-tech company).
It's factually correct: There are more executives at tech companies who have college degrees than there are tech executives who don't, and VASTLY more than there are people like Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/Dell.
Now, the thing is, I agree with your sentiment - I do think that the people who are most likely to be ridiculously off the charts successful in really novel ways are also most likely to be unconventional in other ways. In any field, really, let alone tech, unless that field absolutely requires some conventional background (like medicine nowadays, for example).
But most people aren't world-changers, most people are better suited (despite what they might think) for a more conventional trajectory, and that's fine, too.
Someone I know described the whole business starting environment to me like so:
You have visionaries - people who see something that very, very few people in the world see. These people are fantastic at getting something new started.
You have the "special forces" - these people are right behind the visionary and are able to help that person take the idea and actually begin to implement it, whether it be by finding investors/funding, fleshing the idea out, whatever.
Then you have the "marines" - they come in after Special Forces has softened things up a bit and they really establish the beachhead - these are the people you want when you are about to launch your product.
Then comes the "army" - the product has been launched, the market established, and now the structures of a working company need to be put into place, a company that can keep going on its own with a maturing product.
Finally you have the "peacekeepers" - they start working at an established company and keep it going, but they aren't creating any new processes really, or even, often refining processes - they just keep doing what the previous group set them up to do.
Each category has more people than the one above it, and each category of person is usually not terribly well suited to be more than 1 category away. This means for every visionary you'll have a bunch more "special forces" types, and it means that a visionary might be OK doing "special forces" type work but probably not "marine" work, and your average "peacekeeper" probably isn't going to be any great shakes in a "marine" kind of company. There are exceptions of course, but statistically, they're very, very rare.
And by and large, anyone who is a marine on down is going to need to have a college degree in the current job marketplace.
The thing is, it wouldn't really enable much in the way of behaviors that the governments of the world can't do right now, if they feel like it.
It would be a fairly trivial task to simply fake a video of someone who they want to set up, or why even bother with that when it's even easier: "So and so was found to have large amounts of child pornography on their system" and said person is basically fucked for life.Who needs to roofie them?
Sonic weapons, tear gas, other "less than lethal" tools are being used against protesters and even when they are completely abused and police are caught on camera doing horrible shit, nobody cares. Remember that veteran who had his skull cracked during the OWS protests and it was caught on film? Or how about that woman in the wheel chair who was simply trying to get away but was tear gassed and pepper sprayed and that was caught on video? Or how about those protesters who were kneeling, hands on head, and that cop walked by spraying them in the face? Nobody gives a shit except for the people protesting and a few others. We don't need a pharmacopia to turn people passive as clearly they already are.
I don't disagree that there is the potential for abuse, but not much more really than is currently available by any number of methods, and it doesn't seem like there's much of a need for it.
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Like the military fighting WW2 when they were in Viet Nam or staying with a cold war mentality when dealing with insurgencies, big players often tend to focus on the older battlegrounds because they have a kind of institutional inertia due in part to organizational complexi and a difficulty getting established parts of their organization to agree to change course quickly.
It is a rare organization that is able to be huge while maintaining a focused goal, allowing them to be nimble and get into/create new market spaces before that market gets passé. Even rarer is the huge organization that does that AND makes a truly solid product in that new market to the point where it's very difficult for a new competitor to break in without seeming like a cheap imitator.
Apple has been pretty good at that - smartphones before the iPhone existed, but they moved into that space fast enough, and with a product that was compelling enough and very polished (though not strictly speaking, the first smartphone like it since there was a tiny designer phone out there like it) to become the market. Same with tablets - I tried every other tablet I could find at the time of the IPad 2 launch and nothing came close (though now there are some very good tablets out there that are quite competitive). Same with mp3 players. Same with online music stores.
If Microsoft wants to be innovative and competitive, they will have to get a lot more focused than they are, and they will need to make a true, concerted, company-wide push to make all their products achieve that goal. Jobs and the executive team at Apple was able to do that, but Steve Ballmer is no Steve Jobs, and I seriously doubt the Microsoft executive team is willing to follow him to the cafeteria, let alone into a scary new direction.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me like the only time a new competitor should try to enter an established market for a commodity product would be if that new competitor has some novel way to cut the costs of providing that product or they can add value that the established competitors cannot.
If they can lower the cost of providing the product sufficiently, they would thus be able to survive while the established players take losses that are unsustainable when dropping price. If they can put in an added value that is considered more valuable than the cost savings of buying from an established competitor, they should be able to survive, too.
Eventually the novel lower cost or value added approach would become the new equilibrium as the established players were forced out of the market or forced to adapt, IF the novel approach offered by a new entrant into the market really is valuable.
At least, that's how it seems like it should work?
In any case, it seems to me like an automated system to undercut should probably have multiple levels at which it requires confirmation to go further on something like Amazon, like a penny above the cost of providing the item, and then multiple points below that, or something would require a human to confirm a drop. I'm going to say that the need for speed probably isn't as great on Amazon as it is on the stock markets, so that need for a confirmation probably wouldn't be a make or break moment for a business.
Economics is obviously not my strong suit, so anyone who knows more about this stuff please, feel free to correct me - it's pretty fascinating really.
It isn't a straw man to use your arguments and words against you, and I did not make an ad hominem attack against you.
However, since your opinions on any marriage other than your own (nonexistent) one are completely irrelevant since you are on the losing side of history, and since you steadily refuse to offer any real support for your arguments, I will happily stop bothering with you.
1) Name a single difference that only applies to gay marriage other than the sex of the parties involved.
1a) Explain how, exactly, expanding the definition of marriage to include those differences (including the sex of the parties involved) "debases" marriage (your term) or has any impact on someone who is not involved in that marriage's marriage. Be explicit.
2) It is absolutely relevant. You insisted that gay marriage would "debase" marriage (your word) yet didn't bother to complain about other things that certainly "debase" marriage far more.
3) tell me, will your future wife literally be your property? Will you beat your wife if she disagrees with you? Will you make her father provide a dowry? Will you only marriy a virgin, and will you have her killed if she turns out to not be a virgin intactae? You see, those things, too, have been traditions. I'm sorry, but if you want to argue that tradition somehow is relevant, you can't pick and choose which traditions you want to abide by and which you don't unless i also get to have a say, and i say that if we keep the gender requirement, we also keep the chattel, discipline, and dowry requirements.
Really, though: Society changes. Traditions change. You can still abide, personally, by any traditions you want - by all means, marry a woman! But don't think for a minute that the traditions you value are the same as the ones other people value, and don't think that your desire for tradition overrides someone else's freedom.
3a) Gay people can already get married in several countries and states. So, sorry, chum, but your future marriage has already been "diminished" or "debased." You've lost already, and you aren't even married yet!
3b) People are not wine. An argument that holds for a product does not hold for people. The fact that you even think this is a good analogy is bizarre. Though, I guess maybe not since, as you are a firm advocate of tradition (which thus makes wife and children your property) maybe you do think products and people are one and the same...
Except in today's job market I can get a brilliant problem solver who also has polished communication skills.
Also, you seem to have some idea that advocating for freedoms can be mutually exclusive or oppositional. That is not the case when you take into issues of consent and harm.
If someone with a view I disagree with advocates for freedom and can show it does no harm, I would support their right to advocate since I'm not a hypocrite and in this case their goals and mine coincide.
Finally, stop telling people what they will and won't do.
I support people or companies or anyone advocating for freedom. I do not support people or companies or anyone advocating for restricting freedoms unless those freedoms cause non consensual harm to others.
You are reading my "I support it" as a blanket covering everything, and that is emphatically not what I meant.
I don't get why this is so hard for people to get. Sometimes political action by a business can be good (pushing for more freedom) and sometimes bad (restricting freedom).
I have 2 questions for you:
1) why do you put protecting a word above the freedoms of other people? You said gay marriage would debase the word marriage - why is that somehow more important than the freedoms of others?
2) why aren't you advocating for an abolition of divorce since surely that debases marriage more than allowing other people into that special club. Or advocating stricter laws for dealing with adulterers, since surely that, too, debases marriage.
And actually, a third question:
3) debase? Really? Is your own marriage so pathetic a sham that people you don't know using the word to describe their own relationship going to make yours worth less? When you introduce people to your spouse are you worried they will think you're both men or both women? Seriously, it's just fucking dumb.
Sports should be segregated based on try-outs and ability, not on gender or sex. While there will be some tendency to stratify based on sex or gender, outliers will be able to find a spot that works for them and gender/sex are removed from the equation.
The opposite argument holds true - this is an augmentation of everyone's rights: now straight people will have more options because whereas before they could only marry a member of the opposite sex, now they can marry anyone who is consenting and capable of consent.
Yay! More freedom for everybody!
Oh, wait, it's a freedom straight people don't want, just like gay people don't want to be able to marry members of the opposite sex? Well, I guess that kind of thing is only a problem when it's something straight people aren't happy about.
I wish people would stop saying that this is just a corporation getting involved in politics, as if, de facto, that is bad.
A company getting involved in politics in order to trample individual rights is bad, but a company getting involved in politics to promote individual rits is good. Just getting political without any differentiation as to why is not inherently a good or bad thing, but HOW they get involved can be good or bad.
An example: I like it when companies give money to groups that help build up the communities they live in and thus promote a better environment for all. So, I like, for example, that Chik Fillet (or however they spell it) gives some money, from what I understand, to schools in their various communities.
But what I find abhorrent is that Chik Fillet gives money to groups fighting against marriage equality.
Gosh, what to do? Well, I could say I don't like it when corporations get political, but that would be dumb. So instead I say "hey, Chik Fillet - keep giving money to schools, but stop giving money to hate groups! If you do that, I will probably become a customer again!"
If you don't like *how* a specific corporation is being political, then tell them, publicize the things they do wrong or that you don't like, and try to get them to change that specific behavior.
But just being all bothered by them being political in the first place seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
This isn't Google being "political" it is instead Google promoting freedom that does not impinge on the rights of others.
I like it when companies promote freedoms that do not impinge on the rights of others. I do not like it when companies try to restrict the rights of others when those rights would do no harm.
So, try seeing a bit of nuance rather than just ominously saying it's political as if it were some kind of monolithic behavior that can't be judged on its own merits.
Just like individual humans, so, too, are corporations able to behave in a myriad of ways, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes both in the same individual or corporation.
I support freedom and the promotion of freedom, and if a large corporation wants to put support into advocating freedom, I'm good with it.
What I am not good with is when corporations use their clout to reduce freedoms.
In this case, then, I'm fine with Google doing this. Hell, if Fox news or Haliburton were to promote marriage equality I would be fine with it.
To correct your read on hate crimes: the protected class isn't a specific minority, but rather an entire class of behavior.
Sexual orientation is the protected class in this case, so anyone who seeks out a victim based on that victims sexual orientation and who makes it clear that is the reason for the attack can be charged with the aggravated offense.
Same for race, gender and religion - what matters is not the race, gender or religion of the victim, but that the victim was targeted for their race, gender or religion, whatever it may be, and that the attacker demonstrated some evidence to show that it was motivating the attack.
You can have hate crimes perpetrated against someone by a member of the same group; a black guy can be charged with a hate crime if it's shown he was attacking another black guy because of race. Harder to prove, but it has happened.
There is literally nothing in your post that is correct.
Literally every "gay" event I have ever heard of has been more than happy to have straight people there; the term "gay" is often used to say its a safe space, not that it is exclusionary. Do you really think that straight people who are behaving themselves (not being hateful assholes) are being asked to leave or barred from entry? Contrast that with many groups that emphatically will refuse to have gay folk there and will remove them if they're outed. I have literally never heard of someone being removed from a "gay" event for being straight, but even if such things do happen, it's vastly more likely to be the other way around, with gay folk being excluded.
And as for hate crimes, you are ignorant and wrong on that as well. "Gay" is not the protected class, but sexual orientation is. This means that if a black, Muslim lesbian in a wheelchair were to scream "die, breeder, Christian, white man!" while attacking a straight white able-bodied Christian male, she would absolutely be able to be charged with a hate crime.
It isn't the risk of burning off karma you should be worried about, but the fact that you have just demonstrated yourself to be completely ignorant of how the things you are so bothered by actually work. I suggest you take some time to educate yourself rather than remain ignorant and angry.
The guy is too stupid to spell "Obama" correctly - why even bother trying to engage with him?
What, exactly, constitutes abuse in this case and will the people being abused really notice it or think anything of it?
How many customers did Apple lose over antennagate? Not enough to stop the next version of the phone from selling in record numbers even though it was just a minor bump.
Higher prices for limited specs and restricted utility obviously haven't made people stop buying (and the higher price argument is pretty much wrong now, when talking about kit of similar gear), even if the person I initially responded to claims to have a friend who left Macs because of that.
In my experience, and history backs me up on this, abuse needs to be pretty flagrant to get people to notice it, let alone do anything about it. Compared to real corporate abusers out there, Apple is small time to the point where most people can't get worked up about it.
Weird. I know four people who just bought their first Macs because of the new display. Since I have more anecdotal evidence than you, that means Apple is winning.
Seriously, though - nobody but geeks cares if a tech company is abusive. Most people who buy products couldn't care less about Microsoft back when and they couldn't care less about Apple now. Hell, companies have literally killed thousands of people before and nobody except crusaders gave a damn.
This is not to say I think Apple is behaving well, but that unless Tim Cook literally eats a baby during halftime at the Super Bowl not may people will care, and even then probably not for long.
But to say they're losing? They are making vast profits with a higher mark-up on products that really are fairly commodified now... That is hardly losing and that a few nerds are butthurt over their bad behavior isn't gonna change that.
Climb off your cross - nobody's demonizing anything, and you're still wrong.
We know that radio signals can and have been sent from Earth. Some unintentionally, some intentionally.
We don't know that FTL is possible, let alone what the signature might look like.
If I'm going to look for something, I will look for something that I *know* is possible rather than something that I can't prove even exists.
Looking for FTL signatures (whatever those might be) over looking for radio signatures would be like trying to cure cancer with unicorn blood instead of treatments we once used but don't any longer since we've improved our techniques. It's at least feasible that there might be some benefit to one of them since it's been proven that in the past there *was* benefit, but we don't have any idea of what the hell unicorn blood might be.
Also, you're constructing a strawman with your other points: I'm not talking about having a conversation with ET. I'm talking about just finding evidence to suggest ET actually exists. Hundreds of years of lag time between signals isn't relevant to my argument.
And, you're still wrong about how the SETI budget (miniscule as it is) gets spent: It *does* go to refining techniques and looking for other ways to identify ET. We've recently begin to be able to detect "earthish" exo-planets and SETI researchers have *shocker* come up with ways to identify possible sources of life based on chemical instability once we get enough resolution to do real spectrometry. Others are looking for structures in the universe that are simply not reasonable to be natural (mega engineering projects like Dyson Spheres or whatever). Others are looking at optical things like stars being modified to pulse etc.
It's great to have an idea, but to suggest that your idea, which is predicated on some imaginary technology we can't confirm is possible, is just goofy. Now, I will say that the chance we actually find something with SETI as we do it now is really close to zero, but I will say that the chance we find something with your suggested technique is actually zero, since we have no clue what to even begin to look for.
Unless you're talking about looking for gravity waves which, actually, there are experiments looking for gravity waves already (albeit from "natural" sources not ET) to confirm various theories we have.
And, I hit post too soon:
Personally I am a huge advocate of universal coverage and expanding the idea of preventative approaches to health.
The thing is, I can't say for sure whether it will be more expensive or less expensive to have universal coverage than it would currently. I have an idea that it would ultimately be less expensive overall simply because the rest of the developed world seems to have figured it out. However, the cost, as long as it isn't going to bankrupt us (and there's no reason to think it would) isn't the main consideration - it's the good thing to do, it's the humane thing to do.
That said, on numbers: as I said the numbers on the effectiveness of various elements of coverage are truly complex, there are some very simple and stark numbers: with our current healthcare system we spend more per capita than any other nation, and yet we have overall poorer metrics for health than most other developed nations. This tells me that there is either something fundamentally wrong with Americans that somehow makes our exceptionally diverse population that comes from all over the world more sickly and expensive or that there is something fundamentally wrong with our healthcare system (or maybe both). I don't think that can be in dispute, except by ideologues.
There is a missing component:
For people in the US who weren't insured before age 65, how many of them have poor health or have had to cope with chronic conditions because they didn't have coverage or weren't able to afford yearly check-ups even if they did, or who weren't able to afford expensive medications to help moderate known conditions?
Because of this lack of preventative care, many of the people who rely on Medicare after 65 have been in pretty bad shape for decades compared to people who had good insurance and who, even after 65, likely still have good coverage and don't rely as much on Medicare.
We also as a nation have higher rates of obesity and other complicating factors that affect a person's health later on in life (and will affect costs associated with that) than many other (most other?) nations.
The numbers are not simple - there are a huge number of factors that go into determining how effective health efforts are, and anyone who pretends like they know the whole story is almost certainly wrong and pushing an agenda.
The problem with your entire post is that you advocate looking for one single (theoretically possible) thing, that Might make a kind of fingerprint that we might be able to detect, but that since we have no idea how to actually make it happen, might also not be anything like we currently imagine it would be because it would require knowledge and capabilities we do not have, do not even know how to get, and MIT be completely wrong about
Over
Looking for MANY different things we not only know are possible, know how to detect, but we have done many of them ourselves and they would absolutely be trivial for a more advanced species to do. we don't know if any of those species *will* do those things, and we don't know if any of those species will do them intentionally designed to be detected, but at least we know those things are practical to do.
Further, let's say there isn't a way to do FTL, period. Let's say that our universe is one in which the detection method you are advocating is simply not physically possible. We might be searching for something absolutely impossible and getting nothing from it. At least with radio based SETI we are searching for things we know are possible and we are basing any optimisim on the idea that maybe one species won't communicate in that way, or maybe a billion will not, but maybe one in a billion will and maybe we will find it.
It's basically the difference between hoping to get super powers from toxic exposure (might not even be possible) vs. hoping to win the lottery (incredibly improbable for an individual but almost a certainty in a large population for at least one to occur)
Further, the tools and techniques developed for SETI are also useful for other problems, and has lead to discoveries in other fields. The tools developed for it are getting more and more sophisticated while still on a budget, which is certainly good.
Further, SETI is so damn inexpensive its silly not to do it, even if it didn't produce any of those added benefits.
Personally, I doubt that SETI will find what it's looking for, and even if it did find a sign of another civilization, it wouldn't get us the encyclopedia galactica or space wiki. But that isn't the real value of SETI, and that isn't why I choose to support it (financially and politically).
It's not a trivial problem, but it's not that difficult - put in systems that broadcast to receivers in cars where they are, put em in the road, put em in traffic lights, put em in whatever is needed.
Roads get rebuilt all the time in places where they have to plow, so it's not a huge issue to put these kinds of things out there as part of the natural infrastructure upgrade.
Further, make autopilot unavailable during horrible conditions or something like that until the infrastructure has been sorted out.
I've thought about this for literally all of the minute or so it took me to read and respond to your post, so I'm sure the people who actually do this for a living probably have thought a bit more about it than either of us.
They said "If you are a betting person" (meaning: if you play the probabilities) you would "increase your odds of becoming a tech executive" (meaning: an executive at a high-tech company).
It's factually correct: There are more executives at tech companies who have college degrees than there are tech executives who don't, and VASTLY more than there are people like Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/Dell.
Now, the thing is, I agree with your sentiment - I do think that the people who are most likely to be ridiculously off the charts successful in really novel ways are also most likely to be unconventional in other ways. In any field, really, let alone tech, unless that field absolutely requires some conventional background (like medicine nowadays, for example).
But most people aren't world-changers, most people are better suited (despite what they might think) for a more conventional trajectory, and that's fine, too.
Someone I know described the whole business starting environment to me like so:
You have visionaries - people who see something that very, very few people in the world see. These people are fantastic at getting something new started.
You have the "special forces" - these people are right behind the visionary and are able to help that person take the idea and actually begin to implement it, whether it be by finding investors/funding, fleshing the idea out, whatever.
Then you have the "marines" - they come in after Special Forces has softened things up a bit and they really establish the beachhead - these are the people you want when you are about to launch your product.
Then comes the "army" - the product has been launched, the market established, and now the structures of a working company need to be put into place, a company that can keep going on its own with a maturing product.
Finally you have the "peacekeepers" - they start working at an established company and keep it going, but they aren't creating any new processes really, or even, often refining processes - they just keep doing what the previous group set them up to do.
Each category has more people than the one above it, and each category of person is usually not terribly well suited to be more than 1 category away. This means for every visionary you'll have a bunch more "special forces" types, and it means that a visionary might be OK doing "special forces" type work but probably not "marine" work, and your average "peacekeeper" probably isn't going to be any great shakes in a "marine" kind of company. There are exceptions of course, but statistically, they're very, very rare.
And by and large, anyone who is a marine on down is going to need to have a college degree in the current job marketplace.
The thing is, it wouldn't really enable much in the way of behaviors that the governments of the world can't do right now, if they feel like it.
It would be a fairly trivial task to simply fake a video of someone who they want to set up, or why even bother with that when it's even easier: "So and so was found to have large amounts of child pornography on their system" and said person is basically fucked for life.Who needs to roofie them?
Sonic weapons, tear gas, other "less than lethal" tools are being used against protesters and even when they are completely abused and police are caught on camera doing horrible shit, nobody cares. Remember that veteran who had his skull cracked during the OWS protests and it was caught on film? Or how about that woman in the wheel chair who was simply trying to get away but was tear gassed and pepper sprayed and that was caught on video? Or how about those protesters who were kneeling, hands on head, and that cop walked by spraying them in the face? Nobody gives a shit except for the people protesting and a few others. We don't need a pharmacopia to turn people passive as clearly they already are.
I don't disagree that there is the potential for abuse, but not much more really than is currently available by any number of methods, and it doesn't seem like there's much of a need for it.