Yes, it's very easy, in fact. If the restriction on freedom of speech is clearly and unambiguously directed at political speech, it's immoral.
You state that as if it were a self-evident fact. I'll play devils' advocate and say it isn't. I could follow an argument saying that it makes the political process more difficult and possibly less free, but immoral?
Shopping malls over here tend to have these automated massage chairs, which for all I know about massage (and I've taken a course) can not possibly come even close.
Partial facts are worse than outright lies. That's why lobbyists love to use half-truths - if your argument seems to be based on truth, a common fallacy is to stop checking after a while and accept the rest at face value, too. Good lies are all built using the same formula: "We know that (three easily verifiable true statements), therefore (the statement you want someone to believe)."
You did read the topic first right? This isn't about the beaches, it's about freedoms of speech right! So what does beaches have to do with that?
The GP was alleging that sex tourism is the only reason for people to visit Thailand. He was proven wrong. That's what beaches have to do with that.
Likewise, freedom of speech isn't the only thing that matters about a country. Humans, and by extension groups of humans such as countries, are not single-valued entities.
Now, Plato in his book on The Republic asserts that it is not procedure that fixes the flaws in democracy but a highly educated populace.
It is not a coincidence that the quality of the government correlates strongly with its focus on education. The pisspot incompetent idiots we call politicians these days have no interest in an educated population, which would immediately see them for the parasitic charlatans they are. So they see to it that education remains at a base level useful for the economy, but not more.
Visionary politicians of decades past, who had no fear of their politics being critically examined because they actually had a plan and a clue, always had better education somewhere in their agenda.
The various constitutions, seperation of powers, etc. etc. all do nothing to prevent a tyranny of the majority, but they are quite successful in preventing a tyranny of a temporary majority. In most western countries, being in charge of the place for one or two terms doesn't enable you to dismantle the system or oppress the minority of your choice. You can make steps into that direction, you can do a lot of harm, but you can't become a tyrant that easily anymore. We know that, because lots have tried. Berlusconi in Italy, maybe the most obvious recent example. There are others as well.
You can't just have a vote on who to exile/execute like in the good old days in ancient Athens.
Why not? Athens is, after all, the original democracy.
Even the majority has to respect the rights of an individual.
Who defines the list of these rights, and by what authority?
And free speech should be a universal human right.
Says who, and by what authority?
I'm challenging your assumption that what you know from home is true everywhere. Just because our nations have decided upon a specific set of rules does not mean that is the only or the best set of rules. In most of Asia, the individual is not treasured as highly as in the west, and the larger good - of the family or the country, or some other group - is considered important. Claiming that our strong focus on the individual is better is arrogant if we can't back it up by reason.
Every nation puts limits on "free speech". In some the limits are defamation, libel and slander. In others the limits are bomb threats or yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. And in some it is saying bad things about the king.
Do you reserve the right to judge which of these limits are reasonable and which ones aren't?
who gets to define the individual rights that enjoy this absolute protection? And do they have to be the same in every nation, or is there space for cultural variety in your world?
Thailand has beautiful islands, nice beaches, very friendly people and a ton of culture sites worth visiting. Yes, it also has sex-tourism. But at least in Bangkok, there are a lot more real massage parlours than sex-related ones. And getting a nice foot-massage halfway into a several hour shopping tour or visit to the night market (a must-see) is something they could well offer in the western world as well.
Snide remarks, dumbo, work a lot better when they're based on facts and not bullshit.
efforts to defend the widely revered royal family from criticism have ramped up.
That, right there, is the critical point. From my visits to Thailand, I also got the impression that they really love their king.
As a democratic country, they can agree to not wanting to have criticism of the royal family, can they not? Remember that this is not the USA - there is no 1st amendment in Thailand. With that in mind - test yourself on how devoted you really are to the concept of democracy. If you think that there are limits to what a democracy can democratically decide to do - who gets to set those limits?
Well, according to this summary of the numbers, your claim is wrong for both busses and trains, but with more efficient cars, or in places with lightly-loaded busses, the bus may be beaten by the car. That's a surprise to me, I wouldn't have guessed they are that close.
That's why we have architects for buildings, in addition to the masons, electricians, etc. - you are right, we have precious few software architects, and most who call themselves that aren't anywhere near.
But a lack of architects doesn't mean we should build our houses differently. It means we need more architects.
I hear you, and it's great reading that not everyone has signed up.
Though I see a place for both. Agile is great for stuff where reliability really isn't that important, and getting new ideas out is vital. Like, say, games. If the game breaks down, it sucks but nothing important has happened.
But anything where lifes are at stake, I want people to come up with the requirements in full, beforehand. You are right, we don't build anything else important in our society "as we go".
Mass transit wastes huge amounts of energy, and we can't afford it any more.
That's a bold claim. Where are your numbers?
I agree that a bus with 1 passenger is less efficient than a car with 1 person. But where, exactly, is the point where they are equal? And which percentage of the time does it run below and above that point?
Not sure about your place, but where I live, the trains and busses are seldom almost empty. Sure, during off-peak hours they are lightly loaded, but there's usually about 10 people or so on a bus even then, and often more (as the busses run less often, that's how the authorities adapt to peak and off-peak hours, not smaller busses, but less of them per hour).
Show me solutions that scale up/down with the daily load fluctuation, and you have my interest.
See above. Size of the vehicles is not the only thing that you can use to adapt. Frequency works great in many places.
I dimly remember that a Sci-Fi author had already had this idea 15+ years ago. Was it Asimov? I'm not sure. He wrote about a subway system where instead of a platform you have several successively faster conveyor belts, and you'd move from one to the next until you board the train, resp. vice versa.
Dear publishers, if you put out all this DRM and copy-protection and basically treat me like a criminal, then who am I to argue with you? I'll use The Pirate Bay, because apparently that's what you expect me to do.
If you treat me like a valued customer, then I will be one. There's a shelf full of boxes right next to me proving that I'm quite willing to spend money on games. But I don't enter into business relationships with people who disrespect me. I'd rather respond by disrespecting them as well.
I heard that T-Mobile wants to rid themselves of their US division. If it isn't making enough revenue to be kept on the books, it probably isn't doing well enough to stand on its own either. Which likely means it will just fold up completely.
That's as often true as not. Many parts of corporations are "unprofitable" only on the books. Best example: A factory here in Germany, bought up by a large corporation. A year after, it was closed down as unprofitable. The point: It had been profitable for more than a decade prior to the acquisition.
If T-Mobile USA would be spun off as an independent company, with a CEO who actually cares, not a middle-level manager, I'm sure they would be able to stand on their own. If it's swim or sink, a lot of people suddenly swim quite well.
Other sellers have reported that the Groupon salespeople do their very best to convince companies not to put any cap at all on the amount of product available, downplaying the probability of just something like this.
Wouldn't one minute of using your brain tell you that just to be sure, you should set some ridiculously high cap? Say, if you plan to sell 100 units, and in your wildest dreams fantasize about 500, set a limit at 2000 or so?
I know I'm on dangerous terrain here, but it isn't my fault that the waiters get paid miserably. I'm not under an obligation to compensate for a fucked-up system, franchise or management.
Yes, I do tip. Based on the service, my mood, and whatever makes a nice round value. What I protest against is telling me that tipping is in any way mandatory. Not if there's already a service charge on the bill.
Plus I don't support a system that makes one part of the restaurant depend on me and the rest not. I would much rather want to pay the cook based on the quality of the dish then the waiter based on the quality of the service.
Yes, the system is fucked. No, the solution is not to tell everyone to tip more generously. The solution is to improve the wages. And for me as customer the solution is not to raise my tips, but to choose my restaurant based on quality, and not go to the one next door just because it's 20 cents cheaper.
Nobody feels sorry for the carriers, that alone should tell you something: a) they provide an essential service b) in a way totally different from what people actually want
I'm with O2 Germany at the moment, and if you sign up with them, you are insane. I'm with them because I used to work there, well actually at a company they bought - I left when I got the chance.
I'll be back with T-Online at the first opportunity I get. O2 was bombarding me with advertisement for all the special things that I don't give a rats ass about until I told them to stop harassing me - and then they called three weeks later to ask if I still don't want to be contacted. I know how they work, so I knew the lady on the other hand couldn't be blamed, she had just received a list of customers to call today. But I basically told her to put "will take legal steps if we ever contact him again without explicit permission" into the customer details. Has worked so far.
Yes, as an insider I know as a fact that the business plan is basically to get you to sign up to a cheap plan and then proceed along two paths: a) up-selling - upgrading your plan to more expensive versions by telling you what great things the "better" plan offers. Needless to say, they don't care a bit if you actually need it. The customer service people are paid on what they can sell you, not on how good they match your actual demands. b) "added value services" - all the crap nobody cares about they try to sell you. Basically, the old AOL business modell: Take the Internet and "add value" to it. Which, of course, is utter nonsense in itself if you think for even a second about it.
SMS is originally a part of b) though it has become so common and so massively profitable that it's changed its character.
Carriers fear nothing more than becoming just carriers again. Their business models are unsustainable if that should happen. There is a ton of assumptions that the top management is blindly following that are based around this not-just-carriers model. That's why they're fighting so hard against anything that would turn them into just carriers - they have no idea how to handle a world in which they were. Everything from employee numbers to price calculations to the company structure is based on a specific model of the carrier.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's very easy, in fact. If the restriction on freedom of speech is clearly and unambiguously directed at political speech, it's immoral.
You state that as if it were a self-evident fact. I'll play devils' advocate and say it isn't. I could follow an argument saying that it makes the political process more difficult and possibly less free, but immoral?
Europe.
Shopping malls over here tend to have these automated massage chairs, which for all I know about massage (and I've taken a course) can not possibly come even close.
Good to hear it's spreading to the US.
Partial facts are worse than outright lies. That's why lobbyists love to use half-truths - if your argument seems to be based on truth, a common fallacy is to stop checking after a while and accept the rest at face value, too.
Good lies are all built using the same formula: "We know that (three easily verifiable true statements), therefore (the statement you want someone to believe)."
You did read the topic first right? This isn't about the beaches, it's about freedoms of speech right! So what does beaches have to do with that?
The GP was alleging that sex tourism is the only reason for people to visit Thailand. He was proven wrong. That's what beaches have to do with that.
Likewise, freedom of speech isn't the only thing that matters about a country. Humans, and by extension groups of humans such as countries, are not single-valued entities.
Now, Plato in his book on The Republic asserts that it is not procedure that fixes the flaws in democracy but a highly educated populace.
It is not a coincidence that the quality of the government correlates strongly with its focus on education. The pisspot incompetent idiots we call politicians these days have no interest in an educated population, which would immediately see them for the parasitic charlatans they are. So they see to it that education remains at a base level useful for the economy, but not more.
Visionary politicians of decades past, who had no fear of their politics being critically examined because they actually had a plan and a clue, always had better education somewhere in their agenda.
The various constitutions, seperation of powers, etc. etc. all do nothing to prevent a tyranny of the majority, but they are quite successful in preventing a tyranny of a temporary majority. In most western countries, being in charge of the place for one or two terms doesn't enable you to dismantle the system or oppress the minority of your choice. You can make steps into that direction, you can do a lot of harm, but you can't become a tyrant that easily anymore.
We know that, because lots have tried. Berlusconi in Italy, maybe the most obvious recent example. There are others as well.
However, when it's illegal to say otherwise, who won't say they love the king?
Everyone who doesn't. It is not illegal to say nothing on the matter.
You can't just have a vote on who to exile/execute like in the good old days in ancient Athens.
Why not? Athens is, after all, the original democracy.
Even the majority has to respect the rights of an individual.
Who defines the list of these rights, and by what authority?
And free speech should be a universal human right.
Says who, and by what authority?
I'm challenging your assumption that what you know from home is true everywhere. Just because our nations have decided upon a specific set of rules does not mean that is the only or the best set of rules. In most of Asia, the individual is not treasured as highly as in the west, and the larger good - of the family or the country, or some other group - is considered important. Claiming that our strong focus on the individual is better is arrogant if we can't back it up by reason.
So you would be ok with jailing people for insulting the king if "though shalt not insult the king" is part of the constitution?
Every nation puts limits on "free speech". In some the limits are defamation, libel and slander. In others the limits are bomb threats or yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. And in some it is saying bad things about the king.
Do you reserve the right to judge which of these limits are reasonable and which ones aren't?
True, but -
who gets to define the individual rights that enjoy this absolute protection? And do they have to be the same in every nation, or is there space for cultural variety in your world?
You're an idiot.
Thailand has beautiful islands, nice beaches, very friendly people and a ton of culture sites worth visiting. Yes, it also has sex-tourism. But at least in Bangkok, there are a lot more real massage parlours than sex-related ones. And getting a nice foot-massage halfway into a several hour shopping tour or visit to the night market (a must-see) is something they could well offer in the western world as well.
Snide remarks, dumbo, work a lot better when they're based on facts and not bullshit.
Why do people continue to go to countries that suck?
That's exactly why I haven't been to the US during the past 20 years, but I have been to Thailand twice in that same time.
efforts to defend the widely revered royal family from criticism have ramped up.
That, right there, is the critical point. From my visits to Thailand, I also got the impression that they really love their king.
As a democratic country, they can agree to not wanting to have criticism of the royal family, can they not? Remember that this is not the USA - there is no 1st amendment in Thailand. With that in mind - test yourself on how devoted you really are to the concept of democracy. If you think that there are limits to what a democracy can democratically decide to do - who gets to set those limits?
Well, according to this summary of the numbers, your claim is wrong for both busses and trains, but with more efficient cars, or in places with lightly-loaded busses, the bus may be beaten by the car. That's a surprise to me, I wouldn't have guessed they are that close.
That's why we have architects for buildings, in addition to the masons, electricians, etc. - you are right, we have precious few software architects, and most who call themselves that aren't anywhere near.
But a lack of architects doesn't mean we should build our houses differently. It means we need more architects.
I hear you, and it's great reading that not everyone has signed up.
Though I see a place for both. Agile is great for stuff where reliability really isn't that important, and getting new ideas out is vital. Like, say, games. If the game breaks down, it sucks but nothing important has happened.
But anything where lifes are at stake, I want people to come up with the requirements in full, beforehand. You are right, we don't build anything else important in our society "as we go".
Mass transit wastes huge amounts of energy, and we can't afford it any more.
That's a bold claim. Where are your numbers?
I agree that a bus with 1 passenger is less efficient than a car with 1 person. But where, exactly, is the point where they are equal? And which percentage of the time does it run below and above that point?
Not sure about your place, but where I live, the trains and busses are seldom almost empty. Sure, during off-peak hours they are lightly loaded, but there's usually about 10 people or so on a bus even then, and often more (as the busses run less often, that's how the authorities adapt to peak and off-peak hours, not smaller busses, but less of them per hour).
Show me solutions that scale up/down with the daily load fluctuation, and you have my interest.
See above. Size of the vehicles is not the only thing that you can use to adapt. Frequency works great in many places.
I dimly remember that a Sci-Fi author had already had this idea 15+ years ago. Was it Asimov? I'm not sure. He wrote about a subway system where instead of a platform you have several successively faster conveyor belts, and you'd move from one to the next until you board the train, resp. vice versa.
Anyone remember the story?
Absolutely agree.
There is one more aspect he forgets to mention:
Dear publishers, if you put out all this DRM and copy-protection and basically treat me like a criminal, then who am I to argue with you? I'll use The Pirate Bay, because apparently that's what you expect me to do.
If you treat me like a valued customer, then I will be one. There's a shelf full of boxes right next to me proving that I'm quite willing to spend money on games. But I don't enter into business relationships with people who disrespect me. I'd rather respond by disrespecting them as well.
I heard that T-Mobile wants to rid themselves of their US division. If it isn't making enough revenue to be kept on the books, it probably isn't doing well enough to stand on its own either. Which likely means it will just fold up completely.
That's as often true as not. Many parts of corporations are "unprofitable" only on the books. Best example: A factory here in Germany, bought up by a large corporation. A year after, it was closed down as unprofitable. The point: It had been profitable for more than a decade prior to the acquisition.
If T-Mobile USA would be spun off as an independent company, with a CEO who actually cares, not a middle-level manager, I'm sure they would be able to stand on their own. If it's swim or sink, a lot of people suddenly swim quite well.
Other sellers have reported that the Groupon salespeople do their very best to convince companies not to put any cap at all on the amount of product available, downplaying the probability of just something like this.
Wouldn't one minute of using your brain tell you that just to be sure, you should set some ridiculously high cap? Say, if you plan to sell 100 units, and in your wildest dreams fantasize about 500, set a limit at 2000 or so?
Sorry, what?
I know I'm on dangerous terrain here, but it isn't my fault that the waiters get paid miserably. I'm not under an obligation to compensate for a fucked-up system, franchise or management.
Yes, I do tip. Based on the service, my mood, and whatever makes a nice round value. What I protest against is telling me that tipping is in any way mandatory. Not if there's already a service charge on the bill.
Plus I don't support a system that makes one part of the restaurant depend on me and the rest not. I would much rather want to pay the cook based on the quality of the dish then the waiter based on the quality of the service.
Yes, the system is fucked. No, the solution is not to tell everyone to tip more generously. The solution is to improve the wages. And for me as customer the solution is not to raise my tips, but to choose my restaurant based on quality, and not go to the one next door just because it's 20 cents cheaper.
Nobody feels sorry for the carriers, that alone should tell you something:
a) they provide an essential service
b) in a way totally different from what people actually want
I'm with O2 Germany at the moment, and if you sign up with them, you are insane. I'm with them because I used to work there, well actually at a company they bought - I left when I got the chance.
I'll be back with T-Online at the first opportunity I get. O2 was bombarding me with advertisement for all the special things that I don't give a rats ass about until I told them to stop harassing me - and then they called three weeks later to ask if I still don't want to be contacted. I know how they work, so I knew the lady on the other hand couldn't be blamed, she had just received a list of customers to call today. But I basically told her to put "will take legal steps if we ever contact him again without explicit permission" into the customer details. Has worked so far.
Yes, as an insider I know as a fact that the business plan is basically to get you to sign up to a cheap plan and then proceed along two paths:
a) up-selling - upgrading your plan to more expensive versions by telling you what great things the "better" plan offers. Needless to say, they don't care a bit if you actually need it. The customer service people are paid on what they can sell you, not on how good they match your actual demands.
b) "added value services" - all the crap nobody cares about they try to sell you. Basically, the old AOL business modell: Take the Internet and "add value" to it. Which, of course, is utter nonsense in itself if you think for even a second about it.
SMS is originally a part of b) though it has become so common and so massively profitable that it's changed its character.
Carriers fear nothing more than becoming just carriers again. Their business models are unsustainable if that should happen. There is a ton of assumptions that the top management is blindly following that are based around this not-just-carriers model. That's why they're fighting so hard against anything that would turn them into just carriers - they have no idea how to handle a world in which they were. Everything from employee numbers to price calculations to the company structure is based on a specific model of the carrier.
That's because it is an enjoyable sight. Sexually provocative clothing is inappropriate only if the person wearing it is ugly and/or overweight.
Or the complainer is a closet lesbian feminazi.
(eagerly waiting for the replies to that one...)